223. Accomodations, Modifications, & Inclusion Anxiety: Supporting Learners with IEPs with Toby J. Karten

Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:

• ​Apple podcasts​
• YouTube
• ​Spotify​
• ​Stitcher

---

In this episode, we talk to Toby J. Karten, author of The ADMIRE Framework for Inclusion, with an extensive background in special education. Toby shares her practical ADMIRE framework for fostering inclusive education environments. 

Key points in our discussion include the necessity of shifting educators' mindsets to focus on students' strengths rather than deficiencies, the implementation of effective co-teaching strategies to create dynamic partnerships, and the critical role of proactive planning in reducing "inclusion anxiety" among students and educators. 


The Big Dream 

Toby envisions an education system that prioritizes justice and equity, where all students have access to a learning environment that recognizes their individual strengths. Her big dream for education is one where injustices and inequalities, particularly those related to racial and educational disparities, are actively addressed. 


Mindset Shifts Required

To create inclusive classrooms, educators need to shift their mindset from viewing students through the lens of deficiencies to recognizing and capitalizing on their strengths. Toby emphasizes the importance of thinking of students as individuals, not categories, and understanding that differences are not deficiencies. 


Action Steps  

To best support students with IEPs and build inclusive classrooms, educators can begin with these action steps:  

Step 1: Build a learner profile for each child by assessing prior knowledge, strengths, challenges, etc. Use interest inventories and emotional check-ins to understand students' strengths and learning preferences. This helps tailor instruction to individual needs and promotes engagement.

Step 2: Implement proactive planning using the ADMIRE framework. By being proactive rather than reactive, educators can reduce anxiety and create a supportive learning environment. The framework stands for:  

• Assess and activate
• Decide and delineate
• Model and monitor
• Instruct and involve
• Reflect and revise
• Engage and enrich

Toby’s book has actions and activities that fall into each category to help educators implement the model in their classes. 

Step 3: Embrace effective co-teaching strategies. Recognize and utilize the diverse skill sets of both general and special education teachers to create a dynamic partnership. Rotate roles and share strategies to prevent stigmatization and enrich the learning experience for all students.


Challenges?

One of the challenges in implementing inclusive education is the presence of "inclusion anxiety" among students and educators. This discomfort or stress can arise from the fear of being perceived as different or from a lack of preparedness to address diverse learning needs. Overcoming this challenge requires proactive planning, collaboration, and a shift in mindset to focus on strengths and appropriate support.

One Step to Get Started 

This can be a big topic with lots of areas for implementation. So, Toby has some simple advice for educators: Look at the person in the mirror and smile. You are a good person, trying to help students succeed. So take care of yourself so that you can keep doing great work to support students!

Stay Connected

You can stay connected with Toby by email at [email protected] and on her website, Inclusion Workshops. You can also listen to Toby’s podcast, Karten’s Inclusion Conversations Podcast. 



To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is sharing their page of Inclusion Tools with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 223 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

Quotes: 

• 3:43 “We want to capitalize on strengths to minimize what might be viewed as a difference. It’s not a deficiency! It’s just a characteristic that might be different than the ‘norm’ of the class.”
• 15:35 “It’s more than just knowing the concepts, it’s wanting to know the concepts. It's the feeling that ‘I can’ and having self-efficacy.”
• 17:26 “Inclusion anxiety could be from the perspective of the student, ‘What do my peers think of me?’”
• 23:35 “Teachers are good at adapting, modifying, accommodating, and all of that, but when you have a general plan, it helps! It alleviates that anxiety because you’re proactive. Is it going to change? Probably. But at least you know…”

​​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Toby, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 

00:06 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Thank you for having me, Lindsay. It's a pleasure to be here and to share some knowledge with the listeners. 

00:12 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I'm excited to learn, along with listeners, along from you, and I just finished your book, the Admire Frameworks. I'm really excited to talk about that today, so that's definitely on my mind. Is there anything on your mind, anything you want listeners to kind of know about you or kind of the audience to keep in mind as we jump into our conversation today? 

00:29 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Sure, you said you're going to learn from me, but I learned from the people I work with, and that includes the administrators, the teachers, the students, the families, because even though we might have knowledge, like I have in the Envire framework for inclusion with Solution Tree, I don't have all the answers until we collaborate with others. So I think that's what we're doing here, and some of my background, just quickly, has been in special education since undergraduate, you know, before it was called IDEA. It was quite a few moons ago and it's wonderful to see things progress in a positive way and we want to make sure we stay on that track. That's why we keep having conversations like this one. 

01:14 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, that's a beautiful framing. Thank you for that. And so I would love to just dive in with this idea of freedom dreaming. So Dr Bettina Love talks about it as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So, given that context, what is that big dream that you hold for education? 

01:31 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yes, that word justice has a very broad definition. There used to be Southern poverty law. It's now called learning for justice, right, and it talks about a lot of inequalities that exist. And if the inequalities exist in a preschool, they're going to exist in post-secondary choices, and it goes on and it spirals. And as far as injustice, there's all types of things that would go under that umbrella, of things that would go under that umbrella, including students with different color right, who don't fit quote, unquote the norm. 

02:16
Why should someone, and the statistics, point out that unfortunately, a lot of students of color are put in that SPED, special ed population, which doesn't mean that they are one of the IDEA classifications? But if you compare some of the behaviors of someone of color, a student of color, to someone not of color, and the same behaviors they exhibit, they might be tracked into special ed sooner than someone else who doesn't have that racial you know characteristic. And it doesn't mean that everyone is going to get the same treatment. We're not all the same. That's not what equity means. 

02:57
But injustice means that we have to try to give everyone what they need to learn. Certain cultures learn better in groups, so we'll do more cooperative activities because they like that, whereas other cultures, families, don't question professionals because, la maestro, they're thinking that they have all the answers. But together we have all the answers to try to diminish some of the injustice that exists out there. Because, you know, especially in the Admire book, I have one of the chapters that talks about think individuals, not categories, and that means that, yeah, the kid might have ADHD, but that doesn't define who he, she or they are. You know, we want to capitalize on strengths, to minimize what might be viewed as a difference is not a deficiency, it's just a characteristic that might be different than quote unquote the norm of the class. 

04:00 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Love that. I love that you're getting into all of the different things right, kind of the racialization of students and student bodies and behaviors and how that also influences who is in the classrooms, and not even meeting the idea of classification. It's like so fascinating. Thank you for naming that, and I do love so much of the pieces in your book, particularly that piece around individuals not categories, and the idea of strengths, not deficiencies, and so I. For me, that's certainly a mindset shift that I've seen in teachers I coach and even my own special education teacher journey, right is like this is really important to kind of shift that common perspective of like here's all these needs versus like here's actually all these strengths, like my students think brilliantly and maybe like the communication avenue is the struggle, but like let's harness that brilliant thinking, right. So I'm curious is that like the main mindset shift required, would you say, for educators? Are there other mindset shifts that are really helpful when we're talking about inclusion and students with IEPs? 

05:07 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, that's a great framework for it as well, and we want to make sure that we capitalize on strengths. That is essential and yours, mine and theirs. You know, and you know families might be overwhelmed. Know and and, and you know families might be overwhelmed but also they might have great strength that maybe they're going to come in and talk to the class or, you know, do something and help their child to learn. Same thing with a paraprofessional who's working with a special ed teacher. They might not know what to do but their strength is listening and following directions. So we need to direct people sometimes to maximize their strengths and set that situation with research-based practices. You know, like universal design for learning. 

05:58
Right, the book has a lot of evidence-based practices. It's not just the flavor of the month, it talks a lot about how it looks in the classroom when I'm teaching blank, whether it's fractions, meiosis or the letter C has two sounds. You know we have to try to get learners to realize that maybe their strength is not auditory but maybe it's tactile, that maybe their strength is not auditory but maybe it's tactile. So we do silly stuff like you know salt to write letters, you know fun stuff. Nobody says this has to be difficult or boring for kids or the teachers. It just has to be that word in the legislation which is under broad interpretation and it's called appropriate. So I think it's appropriate, back to your original question, to just capitalize on strengths. Capitalize on the teacher's strengths, you know, whether they're veteran teachers or new to the field, we all have strengths and that's what we need to focus on to move ahead. 

07:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. And it makes me think again along this line of, like the strengths, like totally lean on those strengths, and also coupled with that kind of the idea that we still want to appropriately challenge students right, and like, have those high expectations that they can do things. I often see and I have certainly have been the person, the teacher, who has said, like oh, I'm just going to hyper scaffold this and I'm going to put in all these extra supports because, like, I'm not sure that they'll be successful versus more scaffolding in the moment. And like, what does each individual need? Right, like all that stuff. And, and what it makes me think of is this common question that I get from teachers of, like, okay, what's the, what's the difference between accommodations and modifications? And you have some really interesting language around this kind of concept as well. I'd love to hear just kind of your thoughts and talk through that. 

07:51 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Right, we go back to a fairy tale, goldilocks, or a tale, whatever you know. 

07:56
Not too much, not too little, just right. What does that look like? The researcher was Vygotsky the zone of proximal development. You know, you want the work to be a little bit harder, but not so hard that it's frustrating. But you want to challenge critical thinking skills. But what if the kid makes a mistake? Love mistakes, we call that error analysis. 

08:21
There's a math thing in a middle school where it's a video. I love this one, it's called my Favorite Mistake. And they collect all the exit cards from, you know, the students at the end of the session and the next lesson begins with my favorite mistake. No names mentioned, no stigmatization, because we're going to learn that way. It's experiential, john Dewey, we learn by doing. We need to step away from the scripted lesson plan because kids don't exist there. 

08:56
So, between an accommodation and a modification. So accommodation perhaps, you know, is where I am not diluting the original standard, but I'm helping you to access the standard. So let's say you had closed captioning put on for a child with dyslexia and it wasn't a spelling test where they had to write the words. You know that would be an accommodation, right. Or you would perhaps have a math test that had 20, but the questions in the child didn't have enough stamina to do those questions and they were all similar. So maybe you've narrowed it down to 10 or you put it in two sittings. But a modification might be, if everyone else is working on multi-syllabic words in reading, this student is working on just CVC words, consonant vowel, consonant one syllable, because that is their level and if it was more than that they'd be frustrated. 

10:03
The caveat is we don't stop there. We do something called progress monitoring. We do something called assessment informal and formal assessment. You know four to six weeks every week, every other day. Sound drills. You know four to six weeks every week, every other day, sound drills. You know, whatever it takes, math quizzes. You know online tools, handheld tools. We do different things, but a modification would be if the child wasn't able to complete the same task. 

10:35
But that doesn't mean if a child is in a chemistry class, he or she or they can't work cooperatively with peers under a scripted thing, if their academic level wasn't there, if they learned term taking, if they had a specific role that they were there. So it has to be. Even if it's a modification. It also has to be age appropriate and interest appropriate. You know there's a lot of caveats. I know I'm being greedy here, but you know you asked the question and you know first thing we want to look at accommodations and then, if not, modifications. And that goes back to the SDI, the specially designed instruction in a student's individual educational program, iep. 

11:23 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh my gosh. I just want to lift up two things you said that were just so good. We don't stop there, right, Like we don't just stop and say, oh well, this is just their level, Guess that'll be that forever. Like that, I think, is very commonly what we do and we can't. So I love that you named that and I also love that you're just like. 

11:40
You know the age and interest appropriate thing is really really important. And I think the interest piece I was just in a coaching call yesterday with people who were like we have to learn to know our students in our classes so that we can get the interests information so that we can then personalize. Again to your point of like the scripted is not going to work for all the students because everyone has different like motivations and interests and all of those pieces. They're individual humans, right? So I'm just resonating so much with what you're saying. Thank you for that. And, and I know you have a ton of tools you you even started naming some of them, but I'm wondering if you can share maybe like the admire framework or any specific actions that could support teachers, you know, when they're thinking about designing instruction and making it personal and thinking about those accommodations for students to help them be successful, leaning on their strengths, all that stuff. 

12:34 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, and one of my favorite I make people do things in the book right, because it's experiential. I said so. It's better than just reading the words, so you could have a piece of paper or a pencil next to it. I'm actually going out with this book in Arizona on Sunday and I'm excited because I know it sounds silly, I'm the author, but I'm excited to see it again in action and that's what we need to do is to put these things in action. So we say connect to students. So the book has something like a learner profile. You know what are the strengths, what are the challenges, what are what? V-a-k-t. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile. Some kids are movers and shakers and I'm tired of like. 

13:20
I was a teacher for a very long time in a school district in New Jersey and Brooklyn, if you hear any accent there. But one thing that I always did you know that fake errand for the kid who needed to move. Well, there's ways to get movement in the classroom beyond that fake errand and having kids moving around, scanning devices, you know, using their devices to scan QR codes, talking to each other in centers and stations and having a classroom that's set up. So that's what the book invites people to do. And the ADMIRE framework is very basic. The acronym itself stands for assess, inactivate, decide and delineate, model and monitor, instruct and involve, reflect and revise and engage and enrich and you can enrich a child with an IEP as well, not just the gifted students. And the book talks about the inclusion paradigm and the fact that there's going to be mixed abilities in there. So it gives specific examples. Like one of the inclusion principles is step by step. I have you trying to do a step-by-step origami to just to create a level of frustration without enough instructions. But then I have you go to a video online that explains it, because some people like videos and like things repeated. You know, um, are students um working memories, uh, whether they have an IEP or not, and and professionals aren't the same. 

14:56
So I came up with the ADMIRE framework to kind of house it and under that are 65 different actions that people could do under there. So, like, one of the things is assess and activate prior knowledge and we could do that. And the book has templates with interest inventories, you know, valuing emotional check ins. How do we do that? Because it's not just about the academics, but sometimes the, and often and anyone in the field of education is nodding their head now, just as you are, lindsay that you know it's more than just knowing the concepts. It's wanting to know the concepts, it's feeling that I can and that self-efficacy. And not having that, you know, inclusion, anxiety, whether you're a student in the class or whether you're a professional or a family member. But having that mindset, we're going to succeed. We are going to succeed and here's how. 

16:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yes, thank you for that, and you mentioned just now inclusion anxiety. I was really interested in that part of the book and I would love if you could elaborate on that just a little bit for us and tell us what it's about and what the research is. 

16:18 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, it could be a feeling of discomfort, stress, worry. You know I work with so many students that were conscious of where I was standing in the room and if other students saw me standing near them because they didn't want to be viewed by their peers as being different. I was recently coaching a fourth grade class and they were reading I believe it was James and the Giant Peach, and they all had their copy of the book. But I found an online copy through the Sherlock Holmes Center in Rhode Island. They have great PDFs of literature and I'll give you that link that, if you want to include with that and a few of the others, are my favorite tips for our listeners because we need to spread the word Humminbird. So, anyway, I had that copy of it, but the specific student who needed that copy refused to take it Because none of the other students had it. You know he or she was feeling anxiety because of difference. 

17:26
Inclusion anxiety could be that from the perspective of the student what do my peers think of me? Or I'm going to sit there and nod my head because when the teacher asks questions, I'm not going to ask a question. But what if the teacher flipped that and said everyone has to ask a question on an index card and collected them Right? There's ways to circumvent that. Inclusion anxiety also exists for professionals. You know I've been there myself where someone from the child study team in New Jersey came up to me and said here's the new kid. And I didn't know that new kid before. Should I have been prepped ahead of time? Yeah, did I experience some anxiety? Yeah, because I wanted to do that thing and the book is big on that and I have a ton of planners in there. I wanted to do the mega planning, the pre-planning, and be prepared, be proactive rather than reactive, and that deletes a lot of the anxiety. And you know, the reason that I keep writing these kinds of professional materials for educators, administrators and families is the fact that I want to delete the anxiety and I want to replace that with a way to do this step by step. 

18:42
It's okay, I don't know everything I need to know about mitosis, right? So how am I going to teach this and support a student if I'm a special ed support teacher or co-teacher? Well, you know what Sal Khan makes great videos on mitosis, right? I could go to FET, p-h-e-t. They have excellent things, you know. It's sharing our knowledge with each other, whether the special ed teacher needs to know more from the gen ed teacher, gen ed teacher needs to know more from the special ed or the family or related service providers, such as an occupational therapist if the child has autism. And not everyone is the same. Strategies with the same label as we spoke about, because we have to think individuals, but we also have to think appropriate and I keep mentioning that word. And anxiety is inappropriate for anyone. It doesn't help. A degree of anxiety might get your juices flowing with brain research and all that, but too much anxiety, kids professionals are going to shut down and that negates collaboration and sharing awareness and knowledge yeah, absolutely. 

20:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I think you said it in the book. The research that said, yeah, their, their academics, actually decrease as a result of inclusion. Anxiety and their well-being decreases. I mean like two things that were like we definitely want more of these, like, and they're going down right. Yeah, so in the book. 

20:15 - Toby Karten (Guest)
There's a framework at the end of each chapter, and that one is it. You know, admire wellness is one of the frameworks. How are are we going to do that right? Beyond gold noodle, you know Just different ways to breathe without your device telling you it's time to breathe. 

20:33 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yes, oh my gosh, I love that reference. So you had mentioned briefly kind of the mega, macro and micro planning just now. Do you mind talking us through kind of those differences and why you might do? I love that. 

20:45 - Toby Karten (Guest)
I love that, that. That came from a former book of mine that's no longer in print now it is. It's in the admire framework. Right, I recycle that because I love this and I've used it on so many campuses. 

20:57
With pre-service teachers, I once had a math program here. I was an adjunct professor at your university here and I made a master of arts in teaching and these were, uh, you know, teachers who graduated with spanish degrees and and history degrees and english degrees and they were going into teaching at the secondary level and I made them map out their whole school year, whether it was chemistry or whether it was world history, american history, english, french. They hated me, but I didn't make them do it totally before they went into the classroom, student teaching. I just made them do the mega, the big picture, each quarter or trimester. If your campus has that, then from there there each month and then from there thinking about maybe the weeks, right. So you, you, you break it down. 

21:54
I know we have daily planners as well, but if you work in a school, you know that the evacuation drills and the and the nurse checkups and the assemblies, you know suddenly the day schedule gets changed a bit, right. But if you have a big picture in mind and it also the mega macro and micro planning it has, you have it in each part times. You're going to do repetition, enrichment, practice. So even though you did it in the first quarter, you're going to repeat it in the third quarter because they need those skills to move on and you don't have to do it in a big way but maybe having choice boards, centers. So maybe it was out of your protocol to do something like that. But kids need that, the kids who know the most, the kids who know the least. You know they can't forget about the stuff just because they got 100 on the test right. They need to review and practice because that's how we learn. Neuroscience supports that. 

23:01 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely, and I think that's what really I struggle with with the scripted kind of curriculum. It's like there's no room for personalization, there's no room to be like ah, like I need this. I love that you plan out quarter by quarter, month by month, and then week by week because, like once you like before you have your students right and you're planning the year in July and you've never met one of them before, right, like, how do you know what they need? 

23:25 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Like you, don't Right and things are going to happen in that place called a school that you never anticipated. Teachers are good at adapting, modifying, accommodating and all of that, but when you have a general plan it helps, it alleviates that anxiety because you're proactive. Is it going to change? Probably, but at least you know I am going to do, you know, decomposing of numbers zero through 19. The first quarter, you know, and then move on and maybe it'll have to be repeated. But it is a choice and you are having a proactive attitude rather than reactive. You know that's important. 

24:15 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. I think it strikes that perfect balance that we kind of were talking about earlier, like the high expectations and challenge, and not just like making things super easy. Right, we're accommodating and and and personalization, which kids need, so I really like that framework that you have. I also wanted to ask about I think there's a lot of like challenges educators, probably special educators, and educators in general education classes, and particularly here's one where it blends the two. I have heard a lot of challenges around co-taught classes, so where there's a special education teacher and a general education teacher in the same class. Um, that's certainly one I was curious to ask you about, just like any recommendations or things that you've found to be helpful. Or are there other challenges that you want to kind of name and talk through? 

25:01 - Toby Karten (Guest)
No, that's, that's a great question. And uh, co-teaching is fabulous. I've been a co-teacher myself. I've supervised co-teachers, I've facilitated professional development sessions just on co-teaching, and no co-teacher is alike with their co-teacher. But if you do get on the same vibes, you know, and great years, you even end up wearing the same colors. You finish each other's sentences. You have so much fun. 

25:32
I have a very dear friend who's a co-teacher and I have to share this. She said to me you know, it's my first year teaching and I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, right? And I looked at her and I said it's my umpteenth year of teaching and I'm not perfect either. You know, I might be here and I wrote a couple of books, but I don't have a halo over my head either. So the first thing is an awareness that we bring to the table as co-teachers. Each of us has different skill sets and different things we could do better. She taught me how to organize in world history class. I never made a better outline in my life or understood how to do it until she did it. However, I might have helped her keep her job because I reviewed the comments she was sending to the families, which she never did before and I said, yeah, that's kind of good, but you might want to edit it and soften it a little bit. Right, you know? And it's how we correspond with each other and how we get a vibe and how you're pairing teams together, listening to your staff, and that collaboration exists with families. 

26:51
It exists with gen ed and special ed, and there's been situations where co-teaching has a broad definition and maybe the SLP, speech and language pathologist is there for a period of time or the guidance counselor. Think broadly in co-teaching. And co-teaching is not a way to save money. It's not a way for me to sit in the back of the room and mark papers while someone else is doing something. I mentioned centers. What a great thing. Someone could be circulating while they're doing centers. Someone could work with a small group gen ed or special ed for practice enrichment, and that's one thing about co-teaching that you want to always make sure that you do, that you don't create a special ed classroom within the gen ed classroom and stigmatizing students as being lower level because they're in the smaller group. The groups are there for random interest-based could be skill-based, right, but it has to be a situation where you're capitalizing on each of the strengths as co-teachers, and that has nothing to do with age or lack of experience or too much experience. It has to do with using our experiences wisely. 

28:08 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, one of the things I love that you mentioned in the book is is that you could rotate right, like the enrichment actually the special education teacher is going to lead the enrichment today Like right, and just that it doesn't always have to be like you're helping the kids that are struggling and you're helping the kids that are doing great, like. I love that idea Super cool yeah. 

28:25 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, I love being a co-teacher and I used to have papers, like you know, with WHR, where, when, why, how, that as a graphic organizer, and I put it out there and then other kids go can we take one? And I say no, only if you have an IEP. No, I don't say that, you know I mean, but that's it. It's a strategy. Let's share our strategies with each other. 

28:50 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, brilliant example. That resonates deeply. So I think in the final kind of closing questions, I'll just ask I think there's three questions We'll do kind of like a lightning round to wrap up, okay, one thing you would encourage the audience to do once they end the episode. So we've talked about a lot of different things, what's like a good kind of. They're walking into work tomorrow and they want to do something small, to kind of put something into action. What would you recommend? 

29:17 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Easy answer Smile. Look at that person in the mirror and smile because you are a good person and you are trying to help students succeed. And I'm not diminishing other professions, but take care of that person in the mirror, because if you don't take care of you, you're not good for everyone else as well. 

29:39 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, that's good. Thank you for that. Now, what is something you have been learning about lately? It could totally relate to education and work, but it could also be totally something not related to your work. 

29:50 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, I'm doing a lot of work with. Well, let me think about this. If I want to do personal or professional, give you a quick lightning answer of both. Professional, I'm doing work with leveraging collaboration and I'm researching a lot about listening skills, because people think they're listening but they're not really hearing, and that's something to leverage collaboration. We have to better understand how to listen, and I'm guilty of that too. I've listened to podcasts where people ask me a question and I went off on something. We need to respond to each other appropriately and students need to learn that. 

30:30
I acted out with them when they toss a ball and they have to speak when only if they catch it. So you catch what someone else does. And something I'm learning on a personal level is you know I spoke about movement, move more. So I mentioned I had an issue with my computer. So the good thing is that I've learned that if you're not on the computer as much, I average 12,000 steps a day. You know that is a nice thing as opposed to 2000 on the computer. So there's ups and downs of things and I'm learning not to judge yourself. Go back to that person in the mirror and get that yin-yang balance. 

31:10 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, that's great. I love that you shared one of each. That's really good. And then, finally, people are going to want to connect with you, get the book, which we'll certainly link to in the show notes, but how do they follow, kind of what you're doing? 

31:30 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Do you have an online presence or a place where people could reach out to you? Absolutely, my website, inclusionworkshopscom. You will find my contact information. Toby at inclusionworkshopscom is my email. I also have KIC, k-i-c Cartons Inclusion Conversations podcast available on channels that you could listen to, and on my website I have several inclusion tools, especially. You also mentioned about co-teaching. I have several on there, too, so I'd be very happy to give you several of those links to share with everyone. 

31:55 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. We'll drop them right into the blog post and show notes. Toby, thank you so much for this conversation. It was wonderful, lindsay, thank you so much. 

​