We’re So Glad You’re Not Here Anymore

How Digital Academy is meeting the needs of neurodiverse students in a work-based learning environment.

The following post has been co-authored by Amy Mason, Director of Integrated Learning and Matt Juzenas

In 2018, after years of Foundation Workshops, we noticed that in addition to enjoying the creativity provided in our programming, our students were developing skills in the areas of communication, collaboration, and professionalism. The parents of our students told us that they saw positive changes in their children, that their participation in Islands of Brilliance (IOB) workshops encouraged them to be more open to trying something new or they noticed improved communication skills. At that time, we knew these outcomes were significant and that our students were ready for increased rigor. This discovery led us to create IOB’s Digital Academy (DA) - a higher-level learning opportunity for students over 14 years of age.

DA focuses on helping students develop important personal and professional skills needed for post-secondary education and employment. It also provides them with exposure to specific employment opportunities that may align with their interests and strengths.

Students are invited to join DA based on a few criteria: 1) They have participated in at least one Foundation Workshop, 2) Have shown the ability to work on projects outside their areas of interest, 3) Are open to receiving feedback on their work and willing to leverage that information to make changes, and 4) Welcome the opportunity to collaborate with peers on projects and to solve challenges.

Many of the DA projects are work-based and often have real clients that need help with a specific goal. IOB educators and mentors guide students through the process of completing projects in a virtual environment. Oftentimes, the team leverages Design Thinking–a five-phase process that encourages participants to understand their target audience, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create, prototype, and test solutions.

Interested in learning more? Check out what our DA students have been up to the last several months! It's truly quite remarkable.

Work-based Learning Projects

2021 has been a pretty exciting year for IOB’s Digital Academy! Our projects have been varied and gave our students a chance to experience managing a real-life client project, take an inside look at product development from a retailer's perspective, and collaborate around a community partnership. Empathy, ideation, and testing are all part of the Design Thinking process and our students are great at using this process to meet the goals of the projects.

Back in spring, students responded to a request from Rangam, a digital talent marketplace, to review and improve their website, SourceAbled. Rangam connects corporations to the autism and neurodiverse community through a revolutionary combination of technology and collaboration. SourceAbled is a website that has jobs for autistic individuals. With the guidance of our professional mentors, students worked in teams to conduct user testing of the SourceAbled website and provided feedback and recommendations to the Rangam clients about how the website could be better accessed by autistic individuals. The Rangam team was blown away by the DA Team's ideas. After the completion of the project, Rangam CEO, Nish Parikh, said, “The teams from IOB have provided us with insightful actionable suggestions that we can implement to make the [SourceAbled] site more user friendly for our [neurodiverse] job seekers and streamline the registration process.”

Building Professional Skills

IOB also had the opportunity to introduce DA students to many areas of professional development skills needed for education and future employment.

For example, one DA workshop focused on exploring the topic of job-seeking. Students searched for jobs on the interest that appealed to their interests and strengths and practiced filling out a standard job application. In another workshop, students defined terms like “professionalism,” “teamwork,” and “time management,” and reflected on their own abilities to display these skills in the workplace, at school, and at home.

In our summer sprint with Menomonee Falls-based retailer Kohl’s, IOB DA students chatted with Kohl’s university interns, asked them questions about their experiences and learned how they landed their Kohl's internships. Additionally, they heard from a Kohl’s recruiter about how to work with a recruiter to find a job and also how to ask for accommodations in the workplace.

Self-determination and Brilliant Outcomes

Additionally, IOB’s Digital Academy programming was created on a framework that includes important indicators for young adults who are transitioning away from high school and into the adult world of college and employment. We pay close attention to those indicators and make sure they are woven into the DA workshops. In addition to the work-based learning projects, students have the chance to learn specific skills that are included in the overall category of self-determination: self-advocacy, self-awareness, internal locus of control, choice making, decision making, problem solving, self-regulation, and self-efficacy.

Here’s a graphic showing the self-determination skills:

Source: www.imdetermined.org

Once our DA students can talk about their skills in the areas of self-determination, they become more confident when talking about themselves and understanding their strengths and challenges. This confidence leads to changed perceptions – held by both the individual and their families – around their capabilities. This shift in perceptions opens a world of possibilities for our students.

We have taken the self-determination skills and overlaid them with important IOB indicators of performance for our DA students:

In the next graphic, we have applied the IOB indicators of performance to our current roster of DA students:

As you can see from the above chart, many DA students are on track to meet their life goals around education, employment, and independent living. We are so proud of them!

By providing an environment that enables our students to lean into their strengths while at the same time acknowledging their challenges in the context of projects they enjoy, IOB’s Digital Academy is changing the perceptions of students, their families, our mentors, and our workplace partners. We are elevating expectations and empowering our students to dream bigger.

Why We’re So Glad You’re Not Here Anymore

As our students achieve these amazing outcomes, we find that they stop participating in Digital Academy. In fact, 11 of the nearly 30 DA participants since 2018 have moved on from our programming. At first, we were worried and wondering what was happening? Were we not meeting their needs? Were they bored of the program?

Then we realized that their leaving us was one of the best indicators of their success! They are busy doing what they set out to do when they began their journey with us! And that is a very good thing! 11 of our participants have gone on to technical school or university education. Five have part-time or ongoing employment. Five are involved in extracurricular activities.

So to our original cohort of Digital Academy students, we sure do miss you…but we are also glad you’re not here anymore. We are so proud of all that you have and continue to achieve!

We look forward to bringing on a new cohort of students next spring to continue the journey of self-discovery and growth with this group of brilliant Digital Academy students. If you think your student over 14 years of age might be a good fit for Digital Academy, please reach out to us at connect@islandsofbrilliance.org to start the conversation.