TPP 284a: Maria Kennedy on What's Needed & What's Next in the Movement to Support 2e Students
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
48 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 2 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What inspired Maria Kennedy to focus on twice‑exceptional education?
Hey, it's Debbie. For the month of April, Playback Friday episodes are focused on the unique experiences of gifted and twice exceptional kids. These are episodes from the archive that explore how to support a child who is misunderstood, out of sync or navigating the intensity and complexity that often comes with being gifted or tooie. I hope you enjoy them. Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Reber. My guest today is Maria Kennedy, Director of the Bridges Educational Group at Bridges Academy and host of Crucial Conversations on Cognitive Diversity, produced by the Bridges 2E Center for Research and Professional Development.
Maria is also a speaker, author, and advocate and has been featured on Bright and Quirky and has received several awards for her teaching and leadership. Maria is passionate about working with twice exceptional students and training teachers to tap into the strengths of their gifted and challenged students. During this conversation, we will talk about how the definition of giftedness in some countries keeps gifted students from getting into gifted programs, the importance of appreciating every child's unique strengths and value, and ways parents can advocate for their children's learning profile, even within their existing school systems that may not be designed to support or understand neurodivergent learners.
And now here is my conversation with Maria. Hello, Maria. Welcome to the podcast.
Hi, Debbie. Thank you so much. It's such an honor to be able to hang out with you today.
I know. I wish you could do this in person. I think we'd have a lot of fun, but we'll have to be in our respective coasts for this conversation, at least. I would love if you could, as a way to get started, just tell a little bit about your story and maybe your personal why for doing this work and how you got into doing the work that you do.
So, yes, most definitely. So I'm an educator by profession and I got into education because I wanted to be a lifelong learner and my mother encouraged me to do it. I've always worked really well with children and had worked with children with special needs. Down syndrome children is where I had started originally. And then I got into elementary ed. And then I had a small person of my own, my amazing young man, Aaron. And what we discovered was, like his mother, he's gifted. At the age of three, he was doing single-digit addition with carrying. He was obsessed with numbers, wanted to know everything there was to know about everything, and had an amazing memory. So if you read a book to him once, he would read it back to you verbatim.
So this amazing young man goes to school. and gets into trouble at school. And I'm going, the child's three. What can he possibly be doing to be getting into trouble and being sent out of class at the age of three? He was sent out of class at the age of three because he refused to sit and draw circles around the number three. And I said to the teacher, I'm not understanding what we're doing here. She goes, well, they're all three. So they're circling three bats, three balls. I'm going, the child's doing single digit addition with carrying. He can count beyond 100 forward and backwards in both English and in French, which he was learning at the time. He writes all of his numbers. He's not going to circle three.
She goes, yeah, but that's what they're doing. I said, then just give him a sheet of sums. He'll happily complete them. So that was the first incident. Then the next one came out when she said he won't read. Now, this is the kid that walks around with a book and a basketball. Right. He was never parted from either one of those things. I'm going, what do you mean the child doesn't read? So she says, no, he won't read. And the rest of the class are reading and he won't read. So I said, well, how many words are on the page? Why this child won't read? And she goes, oh, there's no words on the page.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Maria Kennedy to focus on twice‑exceptional education?
0:00–4:40
2
How did Maria’s personal experience with her son shape her advocacy for 2e students?
4:40–11:09
3
Why does the definition of giftedness in some countries block gifted students from programs?
11:09–18:44
4
What are the biggest roadblocks in education systems that prevent support for neurodivergent learners?
18:44–23:56
5
How can parents effectively advocate for their 2e child within traditional schools?
23:56–30:39
6
What does ‘dual differentiation’ look like in practice at Bridges Academy?
30:39–36:27
7
How can celebrating a child’s unique strengths change their learning experience?
36:27–43:04
8
Where can listeners find more resources, symposium details, and community support for 2e families?
43:04–48:13
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
TPP 266a: A Conversation with Poet and Advocate LeDerick Horne
TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids