‘But My Kid Has It’ – The Rise of the Fake Neurodiversity Expert in Training Delivery.
Recently I saw a post on LinkedIn where someone who claimed to be able to help neurodiverse children was asserting the idea that people with ADHD have an ‘executive functioning age’ that is 30% lower than their biological age. According to the brightly coloured table they had posted (without a single reference to any research), someone with ADHD and a biological age of 27, would have an ‘executive functioning age’ of 18. This is, of course, absolute nonsense.
I left a comment asking where their evidence for these ‘ages’ came from. Shockingly I never received a response.
People with ADHD do often struggle with executive functioning tasks, but ‘Executive Functioning Age’ is not a real concept. The 30% figure is not evidence based.
The person posting takes money to ‘help’ people with ADHD.
Their qualification to do so? Their child has it.
What’s the problem for L&D?
This is not an isolated incident and this individual is not the only person advertising paid for services relating to neurodiversity without much to back up their qualification to do so.
As we see more visibility for neurodiversity in the workplace there are more L&D teams looking to work with experts to deliver training in this area. There are some really great examples of training available in this area, but there are also some truly terrible ones.
As a person who has been diagnosed with ADHD myself, I am concerned that there are ‘trainers’ or ‘experts’ out there taking advantage of the increased interest in neurodiversity for their own profit. All while producing sub-standard or outright harmful training.
In the example above, telling an employer that their new hire, who has just disclosed their ADHD diagnosis, is going to act like a teenager despite being in their late 20’s, is probably not going to support a positive relationship. It’s also not factually accurate.
Equally I’ve seen suggestions that managers only give their neurodiverse colleagues positive feedback as they may not be able to cope with the negative. This doesn’t help anyone. Neurodiverse people are often more sensitive to negative feedback and we can take a little longer to process it, but we still need to know where we are going wrong in order to improve.
A real expert, who understands the nuances of neurodiversity and the psychology behind it, is not going to suggest either of these approaches.
Is there not a place for lived experience in L&D?
There absolutely is!
Lived experience can be interesting, insightful and help to promote further awareness of neurodiversity. People who have these experiences are an integral part of the conversation around neurodiversity and I am in no way suggesting that these voices are excluded. However, I think it is important to understand where they are most relevant.
I love to see sessions on topics like ‘My Experience of ADHD’, ‘My Experience as a Parent of an ADHD Child’ etc. This is something I really encourage, and think is hugely important.
What I believe is crucial is that these types of sessions are very clearly one person speaking about their own personal experience. Not speaking for everyone with ADHD or Neurodiverse people as a whole.
I can tell you all about my experience with my ADHD diagnosis and I am always keen to do so. What I can’t do is profess to understand the complex psychology behind neurodiversity, because I am not a psychologist. I don’t have the education or training that makes me an expert on these topics.
I am an expert on me, but I’m not an expert on ADHD.
I can remember that and I think others would benefit from remembering it too.
What can L&D teams to do avoid working with the wrong person?
If you are concerned about getting the right speaker or training facilitator to deliver your neurodiversity training, think about some of the following questions:
Do they have any qualifications or education that would give them the knowledge needed to deliver Neurodiversity Training?
If they do not have the education or training, do they have lived experience?
If they are providing training based on lived experience, is the training planned specifically about their personal experience?
Where they are giving statistics or facts, can they easily back these up with research?
Are they open to discussing their ideas and sharing their evidence with you?
Learning is More Than Listening: How to Get Participants Applying Learning.
Learning in itself is a wonderful thing, but it’s even better when it leads to us actually being able to do something. Especially in a workplace setting where being able to ‘do’ things better is likely the reason for the learning in the first place.
However, I have so often been in training where no actual doing happens. Where participants are sat listening and asking questions and there is a lovely slide pack with some well designed slides for the facilitator to talk through. Maybe participants get to have a group discussion about the topics or there is a quiz to see how many facts they can remember. It all seems fine but it’s not necessarily preparing those participants to apply the learning once they leave the classroom.
In the best training, participants are able to practice applying the learning to real (or real-ish) life scenarios. This helps them to see how the knowledge works in practice and work through some of the possible problems they may have in a safe an supporting environment.
This isn’t always easy to do, especially if you are delivering a one-off session or aren’t very familiar with the work of your participants in advance.
Some of my favourite examples of practical learning application for within a single training session are:
Past examples of real work
This is one of the approaches that often won’t be applicable, but when it work is can be a really impactful training tool. I’ve been lucky enough recently to have been able to sit in on some legal training sessions where this has been used very effectively. Everyone in the training session was internal and so there were no security issues in these cases, but security is something to consider when using real life examples.
In the legal training sessions, previous cases, which had been anonymised, were used for participants to apply the content they had just learnt. They were given the cases along with the relevant law and asked to work in small groups to come up with what they would do had they been the solicitor working on this case.
The benefit of using real examples is that they could then compare their answers with the real legal outcomes, which led to some very interesting discussions around why decisions had been made.
Bring a problem
Another approach to applying learning in a training session can be to get participants to ‘bring a problem’ to the session (and hopefully leave with a solution). This can be a tricky one because it relies on participants doing work in advance and showing up prepared, which we know isn’t always going to happen. People are busy and training session pre-work is an easy thing to forget. For this reason, I always like to have a couple of fictional but relevant problems for participants to ‘borrow’ if needed.
Bringing a problem can work really well for sessions on personal development type topics, where participants could come prepared with something they would like to work on and can be supported to find a solution to their problem through the session. This would involve working with the facilitator, in pairs or small groups to talk through issues and identify where the learning can be applied to solve a problem.
Where this approach can be difficult is with topics like communication or management, where the problems faced by participants may be sensitive or confidential. In these scenarios it might not be appropriate to share with a group, especially if the participants all work in the same team or organisation.
Fictional people with fictional problems.
This works much like the approach above but with two main advantages:
- You aren’t relying on participants to remember to do any pre-training work
- There are no confidentiality issues
What you need to do is create a series of fictional characters who have a problem which can be solved by the proper application of the approaches you have just taught. These examples can then be assigned to groups with some attached questions, they can come up with the solutions together before sharing. The great thing about this type of activity is that you can purposefully create example which will steer participants towards your desired learning outcomes.
There are so many other ways of applying learning in a training session – role play being a classic (although sometimes unpopular) example. The important thing is that you are think about how your participants are going to actively practice the skills you are giving them, instead of just listening to you talk!
If you want to hear about more approaches to learning facilitation, you can sign up to my mailing list here:
From Teaching to L&D - My Own Journey Through the Education Sector.
It all begins with an idea.
Hello,
I’m Elisha, I’ve been working in learning or education in some form for around a decade, with experience in L&D, formal teaching and some time in museum education! Almost every job I’ve ever had has been related to education in some way, even my first part time role at 16 was teaching children’s gymnastics classes. Education and learning are what I love and I’ve been so fortunate to be able to make such a varied career in something I feel so passionately about.
When I was studying towards my PGCE at Oxford many years ago, I didn’t even know that learning and development within business and organisations existed and I certainly didn’t expect to end up working in these roles just four years later. I went into teaching thinking that would be my career for life - what else would someone who loved education as much as me do?
Teaching in a formal setting turned out to not be quite the right fit in the end. Those who have experienced it know what an intense and challenging environment a secondary school can be and as much as I loved delivering lessons and working with my students, it was all of the other pressures that come along with teaching that convinced me to look elsewhere. At this point I felt professionally demoralised, and honestly a bit of a failure. The job I had worked so hard towards and I thought I would do for my entire working life had just turned out to be something I just could not continue in. Like so many others, I left teaching within five years of qualifying.
“32.5% of teachers leave the profession within 5 years. 11.3% leave after just one year.”
After leaving teaching I felt at a bit of a loss for what to do next. I wanted a job I cared about and that used my skills but that also allowed me some more professional and creative freedom and didn’t feel as though it was taking over my whole life. After many unsuccessful applications and interviews, I was fortunate enough to find myself a wonderful new role in the Ministry of Justice. My new team were amazing and I can’t credit them enough for building up my confidence and showing me that even though teaching didn’t work out how I had wanted, there was a whole different career path that I could excel in. Best of all it was still related to education - I was still helping people learn just in a whole new context.
Over time I have become passionate about a completely different type of learning. I now appreciate how far beyond the formal classroom our education can, and should, go. I believe that no one should be limited by the choices they make at 14, 16 or 18 and that learning is something we should have access to for life. Anyone who wants to further their education should have the opportunity to do so and this should never be dependent on age, income, location or any other factor. This is one of the reasons I am such an advocate for apprenticeships as a form of learning delivery.
I have seen first hand how education at all levels can shape and define people’s lives. It is this that makes me so proud to be an educator, no matter the setting.
I hope you will join me as I share more about my experiences in education.
Elisha