Undivided Learning with Dr. Caitlin Solone: UDL

Dr. Caitlin Solone, teacher educator at UCLA, explains what Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is, what it looks like, and how to advocate for it during this Undivided Learning event.

For further information on UDL, go here.

Video Transcript

Welcome to Undivided Learning. Today we have Dr. Caitlin Solone. She's back, and we're going to dive into Universal Design for Learning. “What is that?” you might say. I've said that recently. Don't worry, if you've never heard of it. Dr. Solone is going to walk us through it so we can all start to see how education should be shaped. She'll also give us plenty of examples of how she's seen it come to life in public schools to transform how all kids learn together. I'm Jason Lehmbeck, CEO of Undivided, and I'm here today with Lindsay, who heads up our Content and Community teams. Hi, Lindsay. Hey, everybody. Hello. So, Dr. Caitlin Solone, a teacher, educator, inclusion consultant and faculty within UCLA's disability studies department. So, we would really love... What is it? Why should we care? And we can start with the overview, and then we can really go down to the breakdown and sort of the three main tenets of UDL, but start us out. So UDL, like you said, it does... sometimes it sounds like this abyss, like it's this weird nebulous type of term that you hear, and it stands for Universal Design for Learning, and really it's a set of principles that are intended to be considered when teachers, instructors, are creating their curriculum for their classrooms, and so it's really... it's an idea. It's a set of principles and it’s comprised of many different components, three big principles that you said earlier and within each there are principles underneath them, components to hit, and it's really about opening up the doors for learners, creating curriculum, learning outcomes, objectives, materials, lessons, evaluations that all kids can access that really tap into the different types of learners that are in our classrooms so that we can level the playing field and not just give a traditional Scantron multiple choice test and expect that everybody's going to thrive through that modality, so it's really about leveling the playing field, opening up doors, thinking more expansively about how we teach and what factors connect with teaching. And again, it’s really just a set of principles that really reshape the way that we've conceived teaching and learning for so long. I read this great quote on looking at UDL, which sort of encompasses everything you just said, that UDL aims to change the design of the environment rather than to change the learner. Yes. -- And for me, that's really what breaks it down, right? Because we're surrounded by all kinds of people and systems that are telling us the problem is with our children, and instead if we tackle the environment and actually make it accessible to all, then... and which goes... transcends education and our children and disabilities, but that is the starting point, instead of trying to make our children more like other people, whatever that really means. Exactly. But I did want to clarify too in what you were saying, is there anyone who can't benefit from UDL? -- No. That's a hard no. That's a hard no. It's the students with, again... might be inspired by some things that some of us hear in life and that includes students with significant support needs. No. Universal Design for Learning is for all, and that's really the crux of it. That's really why... I mean, it's not new either. When I went through my teacher credential program back in 2010, we were being taught UDL then, and it still is not super well understood, and it wasn't vastly implemented in classrooms either. So then, when teachers are taught these things and they don't see the models in the classrooms, then you don't really see it come to life, but where traditional instruction typically delivers content in one way, UDL delivers content in multiple ways. Where traditional instruction, it requires students to be more passive learners who get information through memorizing and practicing and taking tests, in UDL, students are active learners, so they're engaging, they're analyzing, they're working with the content to understand it, to be critical consumers of information and to really gain that deep knowledge. Traditional instruction too, it... the learning environment encourages students to sit quietly and sit at their own desk by themselves and quietly work on a task that is identical to the tasks of their peers, whereas UDL really creates learning environments that encourage students to explore and look at their... the content through their own personal interests and their preferences, and engage with it through their own abilities and their strengths, and so it's really about moving away from that very rigid, old fashioned style of teaching to a more broad, expansive way of teaching so that all kids can gain benefit from it. And that traditional form of teaching, even if you go off your own experience, whatever your experience might have been growing up, that's teaching to... right, they say, like, teaching to the middle, but, like. teaching to just this broad... probably misses more kids than it actually lands, and so it's time to... -- Exactly. ...update the practices. Right. And that notion of teaching to the middle, like we think of a bell curve or teaching to that middle group, that average group of students, well, what we don't consider when we're really thinking about the bell curve and teaching in that way is that every student falls somewhere along that curve for many different attributes, right, for many different skill sets, so it's not like one student's going to fall in the middle for everything. Students are so dynamic, and as individuals, we're made up of so many different skill sets, abilities, capacities, physical bodies, like whatever it is, and so we really need to be thinking about how complex we are as humans, how complex students are as little beings, so that we can design classrooms that support them rather than exclude them or make them feel bad about themselves, or make them not have the ability to thrive. Yeah, I mean, it intuitively just makes so much sense, and like you both said it makes sense for every kind of student, and thinking, though, about kids with significant support needs, it would be great to go through those key topics you already kind of touched on: engagement, representation and action or expression. Can you... let's take a hypothetical child with significant support needs and share some examples to bring those concepts to life. Yeah, so... And Dr. Solone, and really explain what that means, right, so people can really understand what those three concepts mean in education with UDL. So UDL is comprised of three concepts like Jason mentioned, engagement, representation, and action and expression. So we'll start with the engagement piece. Engagement refers to the way in which students are engaged with their learning and how they can show up to a space and have what they need to be ready to learn, and so it even means talking about things like self-regulation skills, teaching students how to self-regulate their emotions and their experiences. It even means setting up the classroom in a way that makes students feel welcome. So if you have a student with significant support needs, making sure that they feel represented in their classroom, their books with characters that are like them in the library, which there are more and more of these days, that if there are pictures on the wall or student work samples on the wall, all students in the classroom should be reflected in those work samples, should be reflected in the skin tones shown on the things around the... around the walls. So it's really thinking about how do we create a safe space for students to feel like this is their classroom, they belong, and they're ready to learn. And so that's one component of it. It's like that representation in the classroom. Another is that self-regulation, so really setting up their abilities to self-regulate, so putting systems in place to really help them thrive. If they need a checklist, if they need certain communication devices in the classroom to allow them to engage, right? If they need different... really, whatever they need to engage in that setting. If they need a star system, then that's in place in teaching those self-regulation skills. So this is why UDL becomes so challenging for most folks, is because it's so huge. It's really a framework for learning and teaching, and it doesn't just hit on reading, writing, math, like we used to think. It really hits on the whole child, so engagement also comes down to the learning objectives. Do we have the learning objectives set up in a way that really allows for all learners in my classroom to reach those objectives. So it's going from thinking of traditional expectations to thinking more broadly about what is the big idea, what is the big picture here, and what do I want children to learn and get out of it? And then helping students be self-directed learners, so creating goals for themselves, teaching them how to do goal setting, and a lot of that comes down to self-determination. In this space, we, in thinking about students with more significant support needs, self-determination... and those skills are so important and I see so many students who come through schooling and go into their adult lives, and my sister being one of them, and that self-determination is huge and crucial. I was actually just on a call this last week, and we were talking about how UDL can so nicely sync up with the the skills needed for self-determination and how we can really embed those into the engagement principle of UDL so that it's just embedded into the learning of the classrooms as it is. So I'm sure that's maybe feeling a little more complicated now than it did originally, but that's because it actually... It's not complicated. It's just that there are a lot of considerations. Could you... and then it would be great, because that's the first component: engagement. And like Jason said, if you could give an example of maybe a traditional way, like a situation where there's like a traditional engagement, or what we might think of, but then how should that look with UDL for... especially for a child either with significant support needs or maybe significant... needs significant behavior intervention. We can touch on that as well. I feel like those are two of the biggest buckets of students that are frequently... they're the hardest to include, right, for... those are the two biggest excuses we hear from school teams why a child can't be included. Right, right. So in a traditional classroom, without thinking about UDL and without really digging into that engagement piece, a child might come into that classroom and might not see themselves represented around the classroom. They might be at the back of the classroom, their desk might be at the back, they might not be seated next to peers and instead be seated next to a paraprofessional, and might be... They might think that the best placement is a placement that doesn't really represent true inclusion, and then it might be a classroom where a child doesn't have a strong positive behavior support system in place, and it might be a classroom where the standard learning objectives are up on the wall without really considering how to make those learning objectives more kind of expansive for all students. It also might be a classroom where things like making sure that students understand the vocabulary in a lesson is not considered. So those are just a few basic examples. And then if a child with significant support needs goes into a classroom that is omitting those things, then you can see how then... yes, there might be many excuses as to why that student, quote unquote, doesn't belong in that classroom. Well, it's because we haven’t set up that classroom in a way that's going to be conducive to their learning, first and foremost, and that's even before we start thinking about how we're teaching and how we're evaluating learning. That is almost one of the... That's just the most crucial thing to think about in the implementation is that engagement piece, first and foremost, because you can be delivering your instruction in a UDL way. You can be doing assessments, but if a child doesn't feel safe to learn, if systems aren't set up to support their behavior and the true inclusion of that student in the classroom, then, I mean, I don't want to be in a space that I feel like that in, right? I have to say as a... I'm getting flashbacks, right, of things that have happened with my daughter and she was in situations where she was being included for certain classes where she wasn't given a desk,right? And I probably said that on here before, right? And so how... Oh, and this big surprise that she was having behaviors, right? She started behaviors before she would go into this class every day in which they couldn’t... the teacher could not have set it up in any way to make it more uncomfortable and clear to her that it wasn't her classroom and that she wasn't supposed to be there, right? And that's obviously, I say, an extreme example, but a very normal example of what happens, right? And then all of the layers that you really put out there that need to be done, so they're not sitting here with all of these examples on a wall, yeah, of everything from people that don't look like me, to all of these concepts that they don't understand, or expectations that aren't accessible to them. Yeah. Okay. -- Well, it’s actually like, I think, we're kind of... as we go through this journey, the thing that gets beat into our heads is like, oh, you got to make the argument for access to education on goals and accommodations, but what you're laying out with this approach and philosophy is that you can't access that education without these core tenets of engagement, representation, and expression. No, you can't. Yeah, it's just... it's plain as day, right? Like, you say that out loud, it's like, well, okay. Yeah, it seems intuitive, right? It seems like these are obvious things that you would consider, but yeah, it’s not. We know it’s a challenge in thinking about how to bring it to life, but to get the tools and the language to then think about in each of these three areas, like how can we... how can we convey that to the team and advocate for improving their access to education through these means? Yeah, and I mean, that’s a really good question, and I think depending on your team, it's going to sound and look different. If there are schools... I mean, most teachers who have come out of a teacher prep program within the last decade or even last decade and a half, were in... were provided instruction in UDL, and that was most likely a core tenet of their credentialing program, and so the... many times teachers are familiar with UDL, they know about UDL. They’ve heard about it. Again, that implementation piece is difficult sometimes, and so it's not going to be this new concept for the majority of teachers, but I think the key is helping teachers to understand the components of each principle that are essential for our students to be successfully welcomed, embraced, included, and just sometimes allowed in those settings. I also didn't want to skip over the action or expression part of UDL, because I think that's another huge... Great, this child’s being included. Here you go. And then there's no checking in to see what they’re understanding, or there's obviously the opposite of presuming that they're not understanding. But if you could go in... Yeah, and we didn’t touch on representation yet. It's all about how we're representing the content, and we know that learners learn in many different ways. I'm sure if the three of us took a poll, we're all different types of learners and we engage with learning and we approach our own learning in various ways. That's the same idea for the representation principle of UDL. It's really about, am I delivering content in a way that is... that touches on the different types of learning styles. So through videos, through direct instruction, through text, through audio, whatever it is, am I providing multiple ways for students to... multiple ways to represent the information so that students can engage with it in a meaningful way? And it doesn't just mean teaching students to... or having all three components or multiple components in a lesson. It means teaching students to notice what works well for them, what type of learner they are, do they need to read the text, or do they need to listen to the text, right, and giving those options to students in class so they can, again, go back to the self-determination, start to recognize what works for them, not just students with disabilities but all students, right? We will open up the doors for all students in that way. It really does promote powerful learning opportunities, and then if we're thinking about action and expression, it’s really about how are you demonstrating learning. I know for me, if you give me a multiple choice test, I most likely am going to not thrive in that evaluation. If you ask me to write a long answer, tell you what I know about a topic, or ask me the question, I will do much better, and so thinking about that with our students too is... teachers... and this can be one of the trickiest parts of UDL, is coming up with multiple ways to evaluate learners’ understanding of a topic, but it also means that if you're requiring a student to compose a five paragraph essay, that not all students need to write that by hand. Not all students need to type it. We can voice type, right? We can have a scribe. You can have many different ways of composition. I always think we should rename it. It's not writing. It really is composing written prose, and so, yeah, it comes down to really tailoring and having those multiple ways for students to express their knowledge instead of relying on one, and then having that be like the end all, be all, okay, the student doesn't know it, but as parents, oftentimes, you're like, I know they know it. You're just evaluating in a way that doesn't hit on their strengths, and so they're not able to demonstrate their understanding, and again, this goes for way more than just students with disabilities, but students in general. We moved away from just using like an IQ test. We know that IQ testing is very flawed, right? And it's one format of evaluation, and oftentimes we still rely on standardized tests to give us information, especially through the IEP evaluation process, but there's been a lot of changes over time to that too, because of this idea, because we know that these are flawed measures that only give us kind of one snapshot, one way of evaluation, which is why many IEP teams require, and it is required for us to use multiple ways of evaluating, so observation, work samples, and these standardized evaluations before we're labeling a child as having a disability or labeling them as a certain skill ability level in any domain. Everything that you're saying about... that UDL’s been around, that you were learning it as a teacher, right? It's based on... again, this isn’t a nice philosophy. It's based on years of research. It's universally accepted as, right, as best practice, lauded by the CDE, yet it’s not being widely used with fidelity and intent to build systematic, inclusive practices, and you consult with school districts on inclusion and UDL, so what is the biggest resistance against fully utilizing this? Time. Time and lack of already created UDL curriculum. Curriculum designed with the UDL kind of base, so then it really leaves the teachers having to create their own... their own everything, and that becomes really challenging, or expanding on what they already have and really making it UDL. There are some curriculums, like if you use a writer’s workshop... writer’s workshop or reader’s workshop models in schools, those are more conducive to UDL as long as teachers are trained though in different access points, right? So many teachers are not as familiar or comfortable with using audio books instead of a traditional textbook, or having other technologies in place to create more access, and so there’s a shortage of understanding in these different accommodations that we can provide to students, and I think if teachers are trained up on those things, that can open up a lot of doors. There's also this misperception that access or accommodations in those ways, like listening to a book instead of reading it, is cheating in some capacity, and it's certainly not. If you're teaching phonics and teaching how to read, that's one thing, right? But if you're teaching a novel study and literature, that's a whole different story. Same with writing. If you're teaching the actual physical act of handwriting, that’s one thing, but if you're just teaching composition, which is what we're doing when we're doing writing units once we get into the upper grades, then that's a whole different story, and so the biggest pushback is... I think teachers want to do it. They want it. They can see the benefit when they do open up doors and do provide multiple options and consider these different principles, but they haven't yet seen it executed in a way that's a pristine model. And then also, there's a lack of time to develop all of the resources that they need to implement it with fidelity. It's intimidating to hear that, but it's also empowering for us to know what we are working towards and what is not only possible... I mean, it's not... It's just the cultural piece, for me, it feels like that is the hardest first hurdle, and then you have the logistics of how do we get everyone on board, how do we train, how do we really roll this out so teachers aren't on their own? And I will say that, if you ask a teacher... I mean, the majority of teachers are already implementing some UDL practices naturally, and they don't know it, right? So they think that they're not doing UDL at all, and it feels like this big scary thing, and so if you talk to them about it, they might be hesitant and might not recognize it, so that one of the first steps is really helping teachers to understand what they're doing already in their classroom that is aligned with UDL principles, because most teachers are doing many things, but are just missing some key components, and so it's not as much of a... like it's not a total 180 culture shift. It’s really just helping teachers to also identify the gaps and then support in those ways, and every one says it takes about 20 years from research to get to practice, which feels like forever. I feel like we're about at the 15 year mark or so. I can’t... I don't remember when UDL really first started gaining traction, but we're almost there. We've almost had our time, and I do see a shift. I do definitely see a shift in openness. -- In your work at kind of the district level, how do we... how do we think about... where you've seen success, how can we as parents get in at that kind of ground zero level and build a culture of universal... help drive building a culture of universal design? Because it sounds like any parent that would hear about this is like, “Hallelujah, I want this.” Sounds like the teachers are in that same frame of mind, but there's this systematic barrier that we've got to figure out how to collectively work against it. As Pam says, smash it with a bunch of hammers. So in terms of parents, I mean, one thing that came to mind when you were asking that is, our parents, we have so much expertise within our parent pool and if there are components of UDL that parents are experts in, but don't call it UDL per se, like if you have parents that are really well versed in technology or a certain component of technology and want to offer, like going in and supporting with technology or setting up certain systems on computers, that's one thing that would be really helpful. I know one of the barriers when I was teaching was in just simply ensuring that every single Chromebook that our students used had the technology set up on it, that they could then utilize, and so that takes time and infrastructure, so if parents have certain expertise, and I would say, if we have librarians, parent librarians, who are familiar with certain books and can make... ensure that there’s certain books in the different classroom libraries, or... I mean, and these things sound so simple, or parents who, again, are well-versed in that technology piece or well versed in different components that could help the district kind of build up their forces and then deliver that, and that could be really helpful. Parent volunteers in classroom is really helpful when you're doing UDL, because if you're allowing your students to choose how they want to engage with something, it really is so nice to have an additional adult in the classroom that can support a certain station, if you're doing station teaching, or a certain type of engagement, so that can be really, really helpful. So, yeah, thinking about, I think, creative ways to tap into parent expertise and involvement is one thing that I've had my mind on a lot because, again, parents have such a wealth of knowledge in certain domains. In terms of advocacy though, I think noticing what your teachers are already doing that is aligned to UDL and then taking baby steps, so what is the first next thing that that needs to happen? What I see most often is behavioral systems aren't in place, so really helping your child’s team to understand why certain behaviors might be happening. You know, behavior’s always a communication, so helping the team figure out a way that it's going to address the behavior in the classroom, but the root of it, and not just slap a Band-Aid on it, right? And that can be a big... a big help, and so just reminding IEP teams that behavior is communication, so what is the root of the underlying issue here? Is it access? Is it feeling unwelcome? And then I would just start small with baby steps, and I would really start at the engagement piece, so really, like, how is my child feeling when they're coming into the classroom? Making sure that all those components that make them feel like it’s their classroom, that they're... they have a desk in the classroom, that they're on the roster of that classroom, but this is the space for them, and then if your child's not already included in a general education classroom, it's thinking about UDL in the context of a special education classroom. Special education classrooms are absolutely spaces for UDL, and so thinking about what ways can we support teachers in implementing that in those classrooms too. Is there... are there existing ways for educators to share best practices? Yes. We need to have more cross collaboration. If a district is implementing UDL or implementing inclusion, I mean, we have so many teachers in this country recreating the same exact wheel, right? So if we're talking about efficiency, I constantly say, like, if any one that was business minded came in with an audit and, like, did an evaluation of our school system, they would just be mortified by how inefficient it is because you have so many people doing the same things, right? So if we could get together and... It starts at... First and foremost, your grade level teams on your school sites should be collaborating. When I was teaching, I only planned writing and I planned it for my whole team, and I planned the lesson and the extensions and the modifications and then shared it with everybody. And if we could be doing that at a large scale, and each take certain lessons and then create UDL lessons and just be responsible for a few and then share it with the entire state of California, for example, that would be amazing. Yeah. And it's possible, right? It's so possible. The tricky thing is getting all teachers on board, getting them to buy into these different lessons. A lot of teachers like to have autonomy, like to be able to create their own lessons and give it their flair, but if we could just create kind of a base starting... like base level platform for something like that, that would be incredible. What you're talking about too, Dr. Solone, with the teachers, I'd love to know, when do you see the a-ha moments really come most frequently? We'd love to hear a hopeful story of when you sort of see nonbelievers realize that there's value and necessity in teaching to kids’ strengths. Yeah, I have a recent example and those moments are the most... they're so beautiful, but I was working with a teacher who was a little resistant to transforming teaching practices, going from traditional special day classroom to an inclusive model, thinking more about... and it was multiple teachers, and one teacher who had traditionally done the traditional format of teaching and learning where students are passive learners, everybody gets the same worksheet in that model. And then the traditional special education model where we pull kids out or have them just in a special day class. So these teachers then join forces. They're doing inclusion. And after just two weeks, both of them said that they couldn't believe they could already see how beneficial it was for students, how beneficial it was to teach differently, to really think about how students learn, how beneficial it was just to have students with more significant support needs in general education classrooms, and just after two weeks, they started to see it and started to say, “Well, how do we do it better? How do we... how do we build off of this? What more can we do?” And so teachers, it really is so obvious when we change our teaching practices how much it benefits students, and not just students with disabilities, again, but all students. Can we write this in our IEP, that teachers must use UDL? So I've never seen it written into an IEP. I don't know what the constraints are per se around writing something like that into an IEP, but you can write in instructional accommodations and instructional modifications, and so in writing in your modifications or advocating for the accommodations and modifications... Maybe not modifications. Maybe you don't need that, but then you can use language that would come from UDL, so you can write in things like what type of assessments you want to utilize for your child, what type of modality they'll be using for their written composition, or for math, or for whatever it is, their communication devices, their different access points, all of those things can be written into an IEP. All of... Instructional strategies can actually be written into an IEP, so I'm not... I think, just writing UDL into the IEP feels so big to me in terms of implementation. I don't know if that quite sets us up for success in the way we would want to see that truly executed, but if you break down what aspects of UDL are... can we fit into the IEP, I think you can kind of do those puzzle pieces in that way, if that makes sense. A common misconception about inclusion is that it won't work for certain students because they can't keep up. So how does UDL fight that flawed ‘can't keep up’ argument? Because the ‘can’t keep up’ argument is based on our... our formal... our... well, it’s just based on the old notions of teaching, right? This notion that all kids have to be doing the same thing and have to get through it in the same amount of time and have to hit on these benchmarks, same moment in time, and that's just... I mean, no, that's just a complete farce in that no kid works at the same pace anyway, and so kids absolutely do not need to be able to, quote unquote, keep up to be included. That is the biggest kind of misconception that I hear so often. They just can't keep up. No. No, and UDL helps to create access that they can access the learning and the skills in a way that works for them, but even if a child through UDL is not moving at the same pace, they're still moving, right? They're still making progress. They're still moving forward in the learning and having a different... different learning outcomes related to the same kind of topic or curriculum is also perfectly okay in an inclusive classroom for some students. One of the questions from the community was around goals and thinking about any examples of goals and how to think about writing goals. I know this tips into potentially goal bank territory, but even just ideas for workshopping the goals that we have in the IEP and the kind of questions or concerns we lay out for the family, it would be cool to have a resource like that. I think... Lindsay, I'm sure your wheels are turning and our team's turning, what can we do in terms of putting together a resource around those... along those lines? Yeah, because it's so important that the goals can be... I mean, because one other excuse I hear is that, well, they need to do goal work, right? So they need to be removed for the goal work. We have to focus on the goals. Goal work can happen all throughout the day in a general education classroom. No problem. And sometimes that requires us to reconsider the way that we're writing goals and reconsider writing goals that are more... broadly hit on different skills that a student's going to be using throughout the year and throughout a given day, right? So thinking about like if a student is going to be using dictation, that's a really good goal. Teach them how to use a dictation on the computer so they can compose, and what are the benchmarks to... What are the skill building goals that are essential for students to thrive in the long run? And then through those that the... through the acquisition of being able to use those modalities then students can really kind of learn so much more, right? But sometimes the barrier is using kind of the access accommodations or things like that itself, which we often don't focus on in goals, and so if you're not able to use what works best... what will work best for you, most likely, then we get stuck at not meeting goals because we're still not mastering the modality that's going to be most beneficial for us in the long run to engage with that type of material, if that makes sense. Yeah. -- Yeah. We're not... that we're not allowing the students to use what they need to properly reach that goal, rather than it's just sort of this goal, and again, trying to funnel people through the same way reaching that goal where it's never going to be reached. Word problems? Don't even get me started on word problem goals. I can't tell you how many times word problem goals are not met because a student has trouble reading, and it’s like, well, a student can master this goal if you let them listen to it, if it gets read aloud to them, right? So thinking about things critically, that is so important, but we get so caught up doing the same thing we've always done, and it's sometimes hard to get out of that mindset and to allow our minds to be more open and expansive, but when we can, then students can get the skills they need to thrive, and UDL really centers around creating self-directed learners. And so in thinking about what skills does my child need to be a self-directed learner, right, is key, and also, again, ties back to that self-determination and really teaching students how to engage with the world around them in a way that is effective and exhilarating and exciting to them. We all recognize that it can be very frustrating to hear about this gold standard of how things should look, and especially if your reality couldn't be further from that, so the first step is knowing what's possible, what's proven, and the best practices around those possibilities, and then, like we've all said, we have to work on advocacy pieces, both individually for your own child and systemically, but the hope is that the more you hear how things can and often should work, the harder and smarter that you can advocate for what your child needs and deserves. So thank you always to Dr. Solone for leading us down this educational path. We have much work to do together.