S4xE10: Scaffolding Project Team Communication, Including for Neurodivergence

May 5, 2025

Episode Summary

In this teaching practice byte (TPB), we bring you Professor Andrew Begel to discuss how to support communication for project teams through the lens of supporting our neurodivergent students. We first discuss briefly why there is a greater awareness of neurodiversity. Then we go into how to support student communication within a team setting, regardless of your students’ neurotype, since it turns out all students need to be taught how to communicate more effectively! This TPB discusses concrete ways to identify hidden communication activities and how to scaffold them so students aren’t guessing and doing them poorly.

You can also download this episode directly.

Episode Notes

Transcript

[00:02] Kristin: Hello and welcome to the CS-Ed podcast, a podcast where we talk about teaching computer science with computer science educators. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, an associate professor of the practice at Duke University. Joining me today is Professor Andrew Begel, Associate Professor in the Software and Societal Systems department at Carnegie Mellon University. Andy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[00:24] Andy: All right, thanks. It’s really nice to be here.

[00:26] Kristin: So today’s episode is a TPB, teaching practice byte. In a single sentence, what would you say is your practice?

[00:34] Andy: I am going to talk to you about scaffolding communication skills for neurodivergent students and especially for autistic ones.

[00:41] Kristin: Awesome. I feel like communication is necessary for all students, but I would suspect neurodivergent students especially. So, before we start, something that I have heard a bunch from various people is there is a greater awareness of neurodiversity or more like more people are getting diagnosed, and so I thought we’d start there briefly and then dive into the main topic.

[01:05] Andy: Yeah, that’s right, there’s there’s. Compared with like the, the 80s and 90s or the 1980s and 90s, as it were, a lot more teachers and parents are paying attention to students, to their kids who are learners who are communicating in a different way or thinking in different ways and thinking, is something going on with this kid? Could I potentially help them by doing some kind of cognitive assessment, and often what that results in is this diagnosis of ADHD or autism or dyslexia, Tourette’s. And these are the things that people don’t really know until about like age. They notice them, but they don’t diagnose anything until about ages like 3, 4, or 5 or so. Below that, the kids are just kids, and you can’t really always tell exactly what’s different about your child than anybody else’s child in a particular situation. But what it seems to be happening is that because there’s so much more awareness and because the diagnostic criteria are getting a little bit more broad, more and more children are being diagnosed, and actually, adults as well are being diagnosed as neurodivergent or these characteristics, especially autism. Autism used to be diagnosed at the rate of about 1 in 10,0 and it’s now down to 1 in 36. As of a couple of years ago.

[02:20] Kristin: That’s almost like 1 in every 1.5 classes in elementary school.

[02:25] Andy: Yep, yeah, I mean, basically like 1 in every 3 kids has got some kind of spectrum behavior. And no, it’s not to say that your kid is like if your kid is diagnosed as autistic, it’s not to say that, like, oh my God, their life is ruined, and now one third of US kids’ lives are ruined. They’re just different. And really, what I like to do in my research. That I bring to my practice in education is really say like, what, what are the barriers that I’m accidentally imposing in the software I produce, in the educational pedagogical like styles that I’m using, that get in the way of neurodivergent kids from learning. And I try to find ways to remove those barriers. And change the education by not making assumptions about somebody’s cognitive processing capabilities or speed or maybe their ability to spell, or their ability to find things on the screen or their speed of reading, like all those things are different for every person on the planet, no matter whether you have a label or not. And I think it’s really important to adjust your teaching style to the particular students that are in your room and not just assume that either they’re all kids who are going to go to Harvard, or MIT, or they’re all kids who are going to go to community college. They’re, they’re just a range of kids, and everyone has a very spiky profile, which means that different attributes of them are amazing, and different attributes might be slower than others. And that’s OK if you accommodate where they are and you can teach to them. Then everyone can succeed.

[03:53] Kristin: Yeah, I agree. So it’s a mix of it sounds like figuring out what kind of students you have, but also just thinking about, like, not making assumptions that we probably used to be making assumptions about. And that’s feels like a nice segue into our topic, which focuses about communication. So, how about you give me a quick idea first of the context of where this kind of tip makes the most sense?

[04:16] Andy: All right, so I teach software engineering in a university setting, and for the most part, I work with juniors and seniors in a computer science major, though also information systems majors as well. But I also teach this to high school students and to community college students who are also interested in projects and group work. And mostly again in software. Engineering, for some reason, I can’t get away from it myself. Everything I do is always about software engineering. I just like, I like programming. So that’s kind of the context of basically a project-oriented class, where students have to work together in teams of maybe 3 to 4 people. Let’s, you know, the younger ones, we start with 2 people. So let’s say 2 to 4 people where they need to work together in order to work on a project together. And often, what we do is we try to stimulate the context of a professional software team. So before I was at Carnegie Mellon, I spent 16 years at Microsoft Research studying Microsoft software teams, and I got to stand behind them and watch them work, watch them talk to each other, figure out their, where they excelled, where they were dysfunctional, and it turns out, you know, humans are not built, no that’s the wrong word, humans don’t know how to work together. They don’t come out of the womb understanding how to interact with other people, how to intuit what they’re saying, what they understand, and we have to learn that skill, and it turns out that it’s not often taught. And if you explicitly teach some of these skills of how to work together, you can make group work in your classes go so much better, and you won’t have many teams that self-destruct, which certainly happened when I was an undergraduate. My team self-destructed. I’m like, I can fix this. I can make this better.

[06:04] Kristin: Yes. So, quick question is, what size of the classes are these, are we talking about? Like, I understand the team size, but like, part of it is also as one instructor to how many students are you handling potentially at once.

[06:16] Andy: So, I’ve worked with as few as 8 students in my class and as many as 110.

[06:23] Kristin: OK, so this can work it sounds like a lot of different scales?

[06:27] Andy: Lots of different scales, and I just don’t have the experience of working with 500 students at a time. So it could work. I just haven’t practiced that.

[06:34] Kristin: OK. All right. So what is the tip itself?

[06:37] Andy: All right, so the main thing here is that neurodivergent students, especially neurodivergent students, have different styles of communication. Then what we the opposite what we call neurotypical students. And because of that, they are often misunderstood or the things that they say are miscommunicated. We call this the double empathy problem. The idea is that I have a certain way of thinking, you have a different way of thinking, and you are alien to me. And basically, not only can I not figure out what’s happening inside your head. But given the words that you’re saying, which are English and they do make sense to me, I don’t understand why you’re saying them. And so, and this happens vice versa. This is very, very, this happens to autistic people their entire lives, basically like they don’t get other people, and other people don’t get them. So it’s a bidirectional thing. This is, it only happens when there’s two people in the room who are different neurotypes.

[07:33] Andy: And so what we try to do is we say, for the neurotypical people, they have a lot of experience talking to lots of people, and they adapt because that’s a skill that neurotypical people have. Autistic people, on the other hand, and especially some other kinds of neurodivergent people, let’s say people with ADHD. They don’t adapt very well. In fact, autistic people just are they resort to the idea that you are a generic person in front of them and they know nothing about you, and they just start talking to you as if like they know literally nothing. So what we do in our courses to try to make this easier is every time there’s an activity, like, let’s say the team is being formed or they’re doing brainstorming activity or they’re doing a stand-up meeting or maybe we’re doing presentations where you have to watch a presentation and give somebody feedback or receive feedback from a presentation you’re giving. Each of those things, what we do is we create a scaffold for the communication that we are asking about.

[08:28] Andy: So, if you are meeting somebody on the team for the first time, we give you a script that says, hi, my name is blank, fill in the blank. For autistic students, would they go over the script by themselves. They write out what they want to say because it often spontaneous communication can actually be can provoke a lot of anxiety, in especially in autistic people and in some ADHD people. So we give them time to come up with what they want to say. Write it down on a piece of paper, and when they get to the actual meeting where they have to then, let’s say, introduce themselves, they read out the piece of paper. And by doing that, it means they don’t have to think too hard in the moment about what they want to say and what other, and especially actually, what other people will think about what they want to say. Because that’s the biggest part. It’s provoking a lot of anxiety, so they shut down. They spent all their effort in their brain thinking, should I say my favorite movie is Batman or should I say my favorite TV show is Bridgerton, like, which one should I say? And they, they get in their heads and then they, they rattle on that for like 5 minutes inside their head. Meanwhile, everyone else in the team has already been talking and that person has not been listening because they’re thinking about what they are going to say and then 5 minutes later, they’re like, Oh, Batman. And everyone’s like, wait, what are you talking about? We haven’t been talking about that for a while. So what we do with the scaffold is get them a script of what the social expectations are in the room of what you’re supposed to say, have them write it down when they, before they get there. And then when they get there, all they have to do is read it, and they can pay attention to other people at that time and start figuring out how to interact with them.

[10:06] Kristin: OK. So, when you introduce this idea, is it kind of like, you have a course website and like you have the assignments or whatever, like what’s gonna happen, and then there’s a little link that says like, if you need a script, go here and use it, or like, how do you introduce this idea?

[10:20] Andy: It depends on the level of the students. So, with my high school students, I just say, here’s the script. Here’s what you’re going to say. And I, I give the script and I say, here’s the Google Doc with that script in it, please edit the Google doc to fill in all the blanks, and that’s an activity the day before the communication activity. So they go there, they fill in the thing, and then often with a, if I’m working with, I have some classes where I teach purely autistic students in special programs and there a TA will go over that script with them and get them to edit the script and modify the script so it sounds like it’s both explaining the point of what they really want to say as well as, has enough details to make them interesting because a lot of autistic people and ADHD people are super interesting. They just don’t realize they’re supposed to say those things in these types of conversations. So then when they get to the activity itself, then If you are the type of person who needs your script, you will read your script. If you’re the type of person who can wing it, there are lots of neurotypical people who are super chatty and schmoozy, and they’re great at winging it, and they can just do that. But it’s there if they need it.

[11:29] Kristin: So what about at the college level? Like, do you do that level of detail?

[11:33] Andy: Yes, so it depends, so we think of this, I think of this kind of like a, like a 4-year curriculum. In my 1st and 2nd years, yes, I totally do this. I don’t expect them to know how to work in teams at all, and I say, here are the things that you say, and I justify it by saying this is the kind of thing that we say at Microsoft. And so it’s not like out of nowhere, but it’s definitely something I can inspire you to think like, oh maybe I wanna be a professional. This is how professionals talk. And when they get to the junior and senior year, if I know that they have been trained in with some kind of scaffold, like, you know, if I’m in a small liberal arts college and there’s only 4 of us teaching like all the students, I can assume that they know it. But if I’m at like CMU, I don’t know who’s teaching the first couple of classes, the first like years of classes, so I’m gonna do it anyway and say like, this is here in case you need it. If you’d like to scaffold, this is what to say. If you want to say your own thing, that’s totally cool. But I don’t leave it blank. I don’t just assume they can figure it out because some kids, so there’s a whole bunch of kids that when they get to college, who are autistic or ADHD, when they get to college, they think, I don’t need help anymore. Like, I had an IEP all throughout high school, and everything was great, but now I’m in college. I made it to college. I’m smart. I can figure this out on my own, and they don’t go to disability services. They don’t get an accommodation. They don’t get anything. They’re in your class anyway. They are there. At least 10% to 20% of your students are neurodivergent. Guarantee. That’s the amount that across the entire country. And so giving them the scaffold (A) will not hurt the people who don’t need it, but it will help the people who do.

[13:12] Kristin: In my class, I do have them fill out a collaboration plan that includes when are you going to meet and where, like how often. It cannot be ad hoc.

[13:22] Andy: Yes, we do a team contract. We actually have a team contract where we talk, where we have them write down things like if your team, if a teammate doesn’t show up to a meeting, what do you do?

[13:32] Kristin: That is in the intro data science class because it’s mainly first years, but it’s not in the elective data one.

[13:38] Andy: I would totally keep that. Every single year, we do it at CMU, we do it from 1st year all the way to 4th year, like having a contract where you write down those things explicitly. It is amazing, and students still don’t get it. And I will still see students like 2 weeks or like 2 months into the class where they come to me and they’re like, I don’t, I don’t think that person’s working. And I’m like, well, have you spoken to them? It’s like, no, they don’t come to meetings. Like, well, what have you tried to do to communicate with them? What’s in your team contract? How are you supposed to interact with them like that? And they’re like, it’s not in the contract. I’m like, “Aha, maybe it should be. I told you to add something about this. What happens when a teammate doesn’t communicate? And you didn’t. So let’s talk about what we’re going to do now.”

[14:17] Kristin: What have options when something like that, like, in my first year in my intro data science class, you need to answer the question, what happens when a team member starts ghosting? I don’t use the word ghosting, but that’s basically what it boils down to. And the option I have here is like, you are allowed to say we will tell Professor Stephens-Martinez.

[14:36] Andy: No, that’s not the answer. I don’t want to know about this. I don’t want to know about it immediately. I want to know at the end. No, what we tell people is pick at least two forms of communication with every person. So, share your cell phone number for texting, share your Slack, or for being able to talk to each other online. If those two methods aren’t working, what I also do is I assign a person on the team to be the communicator who is allowed to track everybody down. And tell them your schedule, tell them where you live, and again, your phone number, and they’re allowed to call you, they’re allowed to like go stake you out at your class, at your at your courses, like your buildings where you show up for your courses and see like, where are you? Tell them the name of one of your friends who’s not in this class, just who can find you. And basically, you give power to one person for a particular set of roles, so like that’s the communicator. So, like, if you’re not communicating, I have the power to go make you communicate.

[15:36] Kristin: Interesting, interesting. Oh, do you have this written down anywhere?

[15:41] Andy: Well, this is, yeah, we have parts of it written down. We do have our, actually all of our courses are online and open, so I’ll give you the link and you can see the contract and like what’s in it and the students to do.

[15:50] Kristin: Alright, so we should refocus.

[15:54] Andy: Yes, let’s go back.

[15:55] Kristin: The point of the whole thing, which was about this teaching practice byte. So, we started out talking about communication. That’s the main thing that we want to talk about and giving students scripts. Is there more to this practice than just that?

[16:06] Andy: Yeah, it turns out that they’re neurodivergent students because they want to talk in a different way, need different scripts than neurotypical students. OK. So, an example is when you are giving somebody feedback, a neurotypical person often can have their feelings hurt if you say mean things to them. Let’s say critical things. And so often there’s this thing called the compliment sandwich, where you say nice one thing, then you say the critical thing, and then you say the nice thing, another nice thing at the end. You want to like start out with something that makes them feel good. Add the critical thing, and then follow up with something that makes them feel good again. And they’ll still recognize that there’s critical things, but you’re kind of preserving their emotional state. Autistic people hate the compliment sandwich. They think that you’re blowing smoke up their butt and what you that everything you’re saying that’s positive is a lie and that the only thing that matters is the critical information. And so actually for them, the more you try to say a compliment, as a neurotypical person, trying to tell them or non-autistic person, trying to tell them the nice thing. Because it’s almost hard for you to say the critical thing, like it makes you feel bad to say mean things to somebody else, but that’s all they want. So you just have to know that that person needs the critical stuff. And then they think you’re serious and they will trust you, and they will make changes. But if you start out with a compliment, then they don’t believe you.

[17:27] Kristin: OK. So, is that like you do you list this out as like rules somewhere that the students follow?

[17:34] Andy: This is more of like a, I would say more like a modeling exercise, but like let’s say you gave a bad presentation and you have your TA ask questions and then you can teach your TA what to do in that particular case and say like, how should I answer this kind of question? Just model it in front of your students. Now, how do you model the difference between the autistic and the non-autistic? I don’t know because it’s not always very likely the autistic student they might tell you that they’re autistic, or the disability office kind of hints at it through their accommodations, but they don’t necessarily tell their friends or their teammates that’s for sure. I think personally, I’m not autistic, but I feel like They could get further, so much further, and so much more empathy from their teammates if they did come out as autistic and were willing to tell them because then, their teammates would then recognize when they hear something that’s weird, they would have a context to be able to understand it. And, at least recognize that like, yeah, that came out weird but that’s Johnny and, you know, I, I kind of get it. So let me work with that instead of feeling like I’m offended or that Johnny hates me, but I don’t want to be on a team with Johnny, and like that’s, that’s worse, that’s much worse always, because that results in the team breaking apart. Whereas if you can know that the way that somebody communicates is not material to how they want to work with you. Then you can move past that. You can get over it.

[18:55] Kristin: Yes. So, focusing on what this, what the teaching practice can be for other, for people of the listening to this podcast. I think it sounds like the communication piece is the, is the main thing that we want to, to focus on. What are some like clear steps that an instructor can do to try and improve the dynamics of the course and the communication that’s happening among their students? Like, can you give me 3-ish steps that they can follow?

[19:24] Andy: Yeah, so the first step is when you are developing an assignment that involves some kind of group work to develop a communication rubric for how you would want to evaluate whether their communication, whether their interactions are working in a positive direction or going in a positive direction. So first, establish what are your communication learning goals? What do you even think about that you want them to get out of this because again, humans don’t know how to talk to each other. They have to learn that. So we, our teachers, we can teach that. So, how do you want the group to behave? Write those down as a North Star for yourself so that you can figure out what kind of practical tips are you going to put into that lesson to make sure that you’re explicitly teaching to those learning goals.

[20:04] Kristin: But, but not necessarily actually part of the grade for the student overall, right? This is just like a list rubric, potentially for yourself. You might put it in the grade later.

[20:12] Andy: Let’s put this as a rubric for yourself. If you’re starting out at learning how to do communication itself, it’s probably not worth grading at the moment. However, it would actually be valuable to grade it, but the students in computer science I’ve found or in STEM don’t buy into this and they’re like, I’m a person, I know how to talk to everybody and you’re like, no, you don’t, but they don’t want to learn it. They don’t think that they need to learn something. So what I, what I do, that’s next, that’s really important, as I say, these are the rules behind your interaction. You are going to do this like when I do agile teams for software engineering, like, your sprints will be 2 weeks long. You will have a stand-up meeting twice a week, and I just declare it. I say this is the rules that you’re following, and I don’t give them an option of like, well, what would the trade-offs be of having a stand-up every day versus having it every other week? No, I’m just, this is how you’re going to do it. So, and I don’t give them options, I say how I want the positive communication to happen.

[21:07] Kristin: OK, so refocusing. So then you sit down, come up with your rubric, and then what do you do?

[21:12] Andy: Then I look for the communication activities that are in each of my assignments, whether they are explicit or hidden. And I develop a script for each one.

[21:21] Kristin: Can you give an idea of what to look for? Because you said like explicit or hidden, and like what if like, I, I don’t have enough experience to see even the hidden ones.

[21:31] Andy: All right, so. A hidden one might be you tell every group that you’re supposed to meet once a week and figure out like and make progress on your project. And that’s the entire like statement that you say in your, let’s say, in your assignment. And it turns out that there’s a lot of communication required to do that, and you haven’t given them any guidance at all.

[21:49] Kristin: All right, give me, give me some ideas because I do that for my students and now I’m like, what, what, what’s hidden in there that I don’t know of?

[21:51] Andy: Alright, so if they’re doing something like, let’s say I tell them. Again, I try to scaffold what that meeting should look like. So, at least for the first couple, I’m like, your meeting will start with a 15-minute stand-up. Each person on the team is gonna go and say and answer these three questions. The first question is, what did you do since the last time we met? The second question is, what are you going to do today and tomorrow? The third question is, is there anything that you’re stuck on?

[22:21] Kristin: Ah, so you’re providing like the hidden expectation it sounds like in there is what happens in the meeting.

[22:28] Andy: Exactly what is going on in that meeting, what happens behind that closed door, as they say in Hamilton. I want to be in the room where it happens. So, it’s what is happening in that room? What are they saying? It’s not random and it’s not a guess. It’s sometimes, I even tell them. Every meeting must have an agenda. You must write down the agenda before the meeting, and you will turn it in before your meeting. And that way if it’s turned in they freak out and they do it. Otherwise, they don’t do it. But having an agenda for a meeting is not something I told them that your instruction might have told them, but it is incredibly helpful to have meetings with agendas, and everybody that we study in organizational science, which is kind of where a lot of these ideas come from. They know that meetings that people who go to meetings that have agendas feel much more in tune with the work, and they feel like they understand what they’re supposed to do. Whereas if they have no agenda and they just kind of wing it, then they think everything’s chaotic, and they don’t know what’s happening, and they don’t want to be on this team anymore.

[23:27] Kristin: OK, so. Come up with your communication rubric, look to see if you can find some hidden expectations or anything like that, and then you start providing information on what those expectations are. Is there another piece to that?

[23:40] Andy: There’s a piece that’s about evaluation, and this part I’ve not figured out the best way to do this. In that, places where I get to see their communication, so I don’t go to their project teams, there’s too many kids, but I do get to see them when they give presentations. And in presentations again, I also I provide them a template. I give them like a PowerPoint template with 7 slides. These are your 7 slides because otherwise, you get really bizarre presentations that don’t make any sense. But if you give them a set of slides of like, this is what you’re going to say on slide 1 and 2 and 3, it makes a lot more sense. But then I want to give them feedback about the detail of what they said, of whether or not they explained their ideas have logical coherence. So I want to have a rubric that they can see for what happens when they’re actually communicating in public. And had an evaluation rubric, and I don’t have one yet.

[24:34] Kristin: OK. So, that sounds like the future steps for this practice.

[24:38] Andy: Yeah, so it’s, it’s, how do you develop some kind of rubric that they can see that the students can see? It’s kind of like an auto grader, like, if you know how you’re being how your code is being evaluated, you can submit it over and over again, and eventually you can recognize where it’s going wrong and fix it. But we can’t do that for communication because it’s so I know it’s like on the on the spot on the fly, like I, I can’t evaluate it until I hear it. So in my research, we’re actually building AI tools that can watch communication between people of different neurotypes and try to figure out is this going well or not? And if it’s not going well, could I give you advice about how you can fix it?

[25:13] Kristin: That sounds hard.

[25:14] Andy: It’s really hard. That’s why it’s research, right? It’s all really, really hard. But we’re getting there, we’re starting to like notice what you have to look for. And again, when you look at autistic or ADHD students, their signals are different. The way that they do something well is very different than a neurotypical person, and so you kind of have to know who you’re looking at and what their attributes are in order to be able to evaluate it. That’s, we built separate models for each side.

[25:40] Kristin: OK. So I wanna make sure that we’re careful of time. And so, it sounds like the, the teaching practice is kind of more focused on, what are the social expectations of the group focused more on the communication piece, and then you kind of reveal or your goal is to externalize some of that to the students by providing them scripts by providing them like much more detail and what you’re expecting to happen in certain circumstances. And then you also have some, we touched a little bit on like the social roles and that kind of thing. Do you have any other like social roles that you would want to, I think, are important to mention in this moment?

[26:19] Andy: In group work, one thing that can be very, very useful is a person who is not in charge of the whole group, but who’s in charge of facilitating communication. And in Microsoft, we call this a program manager. They had they were often English majors, but they have very, very special skills at making all the people in the room feel like their voice was heard. And that whatever decision was made that they contributed to, and they seemed to agree with it. Even when they came into that room, they did not agree with it. So it’s, but you can usually find one person in a team who is a people pleaser who can understand when two people are talking past each other and you need to like stop that because that’s bad communication happening and they’re just pissing each other off. But who’s not involved. Basically, who can step back a little bit. And I think that’s partly where a TA could be a good person to play this role at the beginning, especially for first years who don’t know how to do this. But as you get higher up in the ages, like if you’re 2nd or 3rd years, there’s likely to be people who recognize this about themselves. That like, I can help people communicate. They’re probably going to be future therapists, which would be fantastic because we need more of them. But every team needs a therapist role. And I think that helps everybody else communicate better with each other.

[27:33] Kristin: But it can’t be also like the leader of the team in essence, that makes everything happen?

[27:37] Andy: Yeah, the problem is that there’s too much power in the leader. And if the leader says something, everyone is forced to listen to them and behave. And so, like that’s why you can’t easily do it as the instructor. Because whatever you say goes, and they won’t push back. They won’t engage.

[27:53] Kristin: All right, so, given time, let’s do our last thing of too long didn’t listen. Can you give me a brief rundown of your practice in 3 minutes or less? Though I suspect this is gonna be a little hard for you.

[28:05] Andy: No, it’s OK. I can do this, I can do this really fast. So, the main practice here is about scaffolding communication for your project teams, especially for the neurodivergent students, who communicate differently than everybody else. And what we do is, when we look at all the different communication activities that are required for your course, whether they are explicit or not explicit in the group work aspects of the course, and we come up with learning goals that are related to the communication part of how do I expect a team that is working well to communicate about each of these things? Let’s say those things are things like brainstorming or forming a team or doing a stand-up meeting or giving a presentation. Each of those things could have a scaffold that says, this is what a great team does, and this is what an OK team does, and this is what a poor team does. And then making those, taking those, those learning goals and turning them into scaffolds of explicit scripts for your students, let’s say for your first years, or for your autistic students who might not know anything about what they’re supposed to say. You can reduce the scaffolds over time and start giving them more, if you can expect that they are performing better in their group work, you can remove the scaffolds and say, you should meet and have this team formation meeting. Here are the topics you should discuss. I won’t tell you how to do them, but figure it out. As they get to senior year, you can just say I have a group formation meeting and you know that they’ve had that 3 or 4 classes already, so they should be good at it.

[29:36] Andy: Once you get to explaining how they should be doing communication, then the challenge then is how to evaluate that communication as you evaluate the technical work that they’re doing in the class. I still don’t have a really good answer for that. Stay tuned. We’ll come up with something good. This is part of the research I work on, but it’s, all these scaffolds are going to do is basically, they’re gonna seriously help all the students who don’t know how to communicate at all because most of your students don’t. But especially the neurodivergent students who think differently and communicate differently and are often misunderstood by the other people on their team, it’s going to help them more easily understand the social expectations of the rest of the team. And be able to fit into those social expectations in a way that feels comfortable for them, without trying to make them mask or pretend to not be autistic or not be ADHD. And that’s our real goal here. It’s basically, can we get everybody to accommodate to one another, to communicate with one another effectively, independent of what kind of neurodivergence you might actually identify with.

[30:35] Kristin: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for that, Andy. I am looking forward to whatever your research shows us in the end, and we will definitely link to it in the podcast episode. With that, thank you for joining us.

[30:47] Andy: All right, thank you so much. It was really fun to chat about all this. It’s great.

[30:51] Kristin: And thank you for listening. If you think this episode will be helpful to someone, please share it with them. You can also support us to make more content like this through Patreon. Our patrons help keep this podcast ad-free and pay for production. So, a special thank you to our three random patrons: Clark Scholten, Jacqueline Smith, and William Turkett. And with that this was the CS-Ed Podcast hosted by me, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and produced by Chris Martinez. And remember, teaching computer science is more than just knowing computer science. And I hope you found something useful for your teaching today.