New Tools For School
As Jill Pring (MNLEND 2024-25) started getting ready for the upcoming school year, her recent fellowship in the Institute’s Minnesota Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities program was top of mind.
“I feel more confident going into this school year than probably any other, because LEND gave me such an interdisciplinary perspective,” she said. “To have a year where I could think beyond the boundaries of education and look at how a child might be seeing multiple providers and how their family might have a variety of needs…to be able to have a year when I could view things through different lenses gives me a lot of energy going into this year.”
Making sure families feel supported as well as the student in individualized education plan meetings and other settings was a key takeaway from the experience, she said.
Pring is a consultant with Northern Lights Special Education Cooperative who supports about 300 North Shore students receiving special education services, including those identified as having autism or other developmental disabilities, or emotional behavioral disorder.
As a MNLEND fellow, she was part of a team that interviewed young autistic adults about their K-12 educational experiences, collecting testimonials that are meant to shape and strengthen training for educators, among other aims.
Coupled with her more than two decades of experience in education, Pring now envisions bringing some of the lessons learned from the overall MNLEND experience to her work in the field.
“I’ve been thinking about how to take what we learned in LEND and create actionable steps for flipping deficit-model conversations into ones that support students and families and where we are really listening to them.”
Pring’s work involves supporting teachers working with students with autism and helping connect their families with resources, though she does some direct work with students.
“If a family or a school team is having a hard time figuring out why a student is struggling, they can call me to be a fresh set of eyes,” she said.
She also hopes to create actionable learning takeaways from the testimonials project that she can use in her daily work.
“It’s one thing to share what people with autism are telling us, but to then make really concrete action steps that can be used to support students is so much better. Thinking about kids in a more strengths-based way isn’t a natural approach for many people, so to help teachers use autism as a strength that the student has can really be motivating for both the student and the teacher.”