One webinar is not training

The email came in the third week of August. Whole-staff CPD, Wednesday, half two, the hall. Autism awareness. An hour and a quarter, tea in the middle.

There had been a webinar earlier in the summer too — a link in an email, forty minutes, watch it in your own time, certificate at the end. A few people watched it while making the dinner.

I have sat in that hall as a teacher. I have also stood at the front of it. I want to be careful with what follows, because both of those people were doing their best, and neither of them had what they needed.

The hour itself

The speaker was good. She knew her material and she did not talk down to the room. Slides: what autism is and what it is not, sensory processing, executive function, why he's only doing it for attention is the wrong frame. A short video of a young man describing what a corridor sounds like to him.

It was accurate and it was kind, and by the end of the video a couple of people had gone quiet in the way people go quiet when something has landed.

Then the strategies. Visual schedules. Movement breaks. Reduce the language. Allow processing time. Offer a quiet space. Most of the room wrote some of it down.

Four minutes for questions at the end — and the questions were the actual training. What do I do when he won't come in from the yard? What do I do when I have thirty in front of me and one of them needs me for ten minutes? There was no time. Sign the sheet on the way out. It goes in the folder. It is recorded as continuing professional development.

Then Thursday.

Thursday, fourth period, a double, thirty in the room, and nothing about Thursday was different. Not because anybody forgot. Because nothing on Wednesday had been about Thursday.

Nobody meant this

The school had one afternoon. That is not a failure of ambition, it is arithmetic. You cannot release a full staff for a day in term without paying for cover. The Croke Park hours are in the calendar and they are already spoken for. Somebody in the building gave up a fortnight of their own summer to do a course for EPV days, came back full of it, and found nowhere to put it.

The principal did not choose an hour. An hour is what exists.

And the speaker — I have been the speaker — is asked to stand in front of sixty adults with wildly different starting points, teaching wildly different things, with no follow-up, no sight of anybody's planning, and no idea what any of them are teaching on Thursday, and to be useful to all of them at once.

We ask an outside expert to deliver one-size-fits-all training on the subject of why one-size-fits-all does not work.

I have done it. I have stood in the room and felt the shape of it and known that half of what I was saying would land nowhere, and I took the fee. That is the honest version.

Awareness is not design

Here is what that hour did, and what it could not do. It told a room full of teachers a great deal about autistic young people. It told them almost nothing about how to plan a lesson.

Those are two different kinds of knowledge, and we keep buying the first while needing the second. Awareness is about the child. Design is about the lesson. You can leave a room understanding a child completely and still not know what to do differently at ten past eleven on Thursday.

Understanding is not access.

And a teacher who leaves with sympathy and a list is in a harder position than we tend to notice. She now knows the corridor is loud for him, that the instruction went past him, that the group work cost him more than it cost anybody else — and the list she is holding is a list of things to do for him, one at a time, on top of thirty other children and a course to cover. So Thursday goes the way Thursday goes, and she concludes, privately, that the problem is her.

It isn't. She was given information and asked to produce design.

The folder fills up by label

Look at how CPD tends to be organised. A session on autism. Next year, maybe one on ADHD. Then dyslexia. Then anxiety. Each one excellent on its own terms, each one delivered by somebody who knows their subject.

And each one hands the teacher another set of things to remember about another category of child.

Do that for five years and a teacher has accumulated labels, not capacity. The load goes up every single time. Nothing about the lesson itself has moved. It is the same per-child transaction I keep writing about here, lifted out of the classroom and installed in the staffroom — differentiation, for adults.

Design runs the other way. One plan that more people can use without being singled out. The instruction said and written and left up. The task separated from the instructions. A route to ask that is not a hand in the air. Nothing in it belonging to one named child — which is also why you no longer have to remember which strategy goes with which diagnosis, because the plan is already holding them.

That is the whole of UDL in a sentence, and it takes a good deal longer than an hour to learn to do.

Lani Florian has been making a version of this argument for years: inclusion belongs in how teachers are prepared to teach everybody, not in an extra module about particular children. It is not a new idea. It is simply not what gets bought on a Wednesday in August.

What it costs

The teacher is now responsible for an approach she was told about but never once practised. We would not teach a practical skill to a child this way, and we know it. We space it. We model it. We let them try it with support and we come back to it next week. Then we deliver adult learning in one block in August and expect it to hold in February.

The young person gets a staff who understand him and a Thursday that is unchanged. He is better understood and no better taught. From where he is sitting, those are not the same achievement.

The parent is told at the October meeting, in complete good faith, that the whole staff did training on autism. It is true. And you cannot say the thing you want to say — that you believe them, and nothing has changed — because out loud it sounds like calling them liars.

The school has forty signatures, a full folder and a defensible answer for an inspection, and not one line of the timetable, the room or the plan has changed, because no time was ever set aside to change it.

What designed CPD looks like

Most of this costs time rather than money, which is its own kind of problem — but it is a different problem from having no budget.

Bring a real lesson into the room. Not a case study, not a composite child — somebody's actual Thursday, on the table, redesigned together. People leave with one lesson changed instead of twelve strategies written down. Teachers argue productively about a real lesson in a way they never will about a slide.

Space it. An hour a term, with something to go and try in between, will beat six hours in August every time. We know this. We teach it to children.

Keep it in the building. Training that leaves when the speaker leaves was a visit. One or two people on staff whose role includes sitting down with a colleague and rebuilding a lesson with them — that is capacity, and it is still there in March.

Protect the design time. I have written this before and I will keep writing it: we fund the retrofit and expect the design for free. Planning time is the cheapest thing in the whole system compared with what we spend on the consequences of not having it.

Train the whole building. The SNA is in the corridor. The secretary meets every distressed parent at the hatch. The caretaker sets the bell. Teaching staff only is a strange definition of who is teaching.

Ask first. What do the teachers in this building actually need, in the subjects they actually teach? Asking is free, and it is the difference between a course that was bought and a course that was chosen.

Measure the right thing. Not how many attended. What is different in a lesson six weeks later. If the answer is nothing, the hour was for the folder.

What this does not fix

No amount of training replaces an SNA, a special class place, speech and language, or the report sitting on a waiting list. A teacher with thirty in front of her and a full contact timetable cannot design her way out of a resourcing gap, and anyone who tells her otherwise is making her carry something that was never hers.

Training is not a substitute for resources. It is what makes resources land when they finally come.

And the uncomfortable part, which I should say plainly because it is my own trade: I am one of the people schools pay for the hour in the hall. If the hour keeps being bought as an hour, I will keep being paid for it and it will keep changing very little. That is not the school's failing and it is not mine. It is what we are all buying.

They did not need to know more about him.

They needed an hour to redesign Thursday.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.